Robert Carlisle v. Board of Trustees of the American Federation of the New York State Teamsters Conference Pension and Retirement Fund, et al.

Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), a Fund fiduciary is subject to a “[p]rudent man standard of care,” which requires the fiduciary to “discharge his duties with respect to a [Fund]” with the “care, skill, prudence, and diligence” that a prudent person “acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters would use.” 29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)). As this Court has recognized, a court’s inquiry into whether a plaintiff has adequately alleged that a fiduciary breached ERISA’s duty of prudence “will necessarily be context specific” because the content of that duty “turns on ‘the circumstances … prevailing’ at the time the fiduciary acts.” Fifth Third Bancorp. v. Dudenhoeffer, 573 U.S. 409, 425 (2014) (quoting 29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)(B)). As a result, “categorical” pleading rules are “inconsistent with the context-specific inquiry that ERISA requires.” Hughes v. Nw. Univ., 595 U.S. 170, 173 (2022). The question presented is: Whether, for claims predicated on the underperformance of a defined benefit pension plan’s investments that lead to cuts of plan participants’ vested pension benefits, pleading that an ERISA fiduciary failed to use the requisite “care, skill, prudence, or diligence” under the circumstances and thus breached ERISA’s duty of prudence when making an aggressively-risky asset allocation decision on plan investment assets requires alleging a “meaningful benchmark,” and if so, what constitutes the required benchmark for pleading purposes.