Groom's new hire bets ERISA's next fight is the plan menu

Groom Law Group has added Gina Alsdorf to its retirement services practice, and the résumé behind the hire runs through the three seats where retirement regulation actually gets decided: enforcement, in-house product counsel, and outside advice. Alsdorf began her career as an investigator at the Labor Department's Employee Benefits Security Administration, the arm charged with enforcing ERISA's fiduciary rules, and later held senior in-house legal roles at three major retirement plan providers. The firm, which announced the hire through its Benefits Brief, is hiring for the product-design questions that will dominate the next decade.

What she worked on at those providers matters more than where she worked. The firm describes her practice as centered on the development and distribution of retirement plan services and products, naming collective investment trusts and lifetime income products alongside the regulatory terrain facing sponsors, recordkeepers, insurers, asset managers and other financial institutions. That is a product lawyer's portfolio, and it settles on two live fronts in defined contribution: the CIT as the vehicle through which plan menus reach private assets, and the annuity shelf as the industry's answer to decumulation.

Both are legal problems before they are commercial ones, which is where the demand for this counsel comes from. The Labor Department's safe harbor for private assets in 401(k) plans depends on a meaningful benchmark that private markets have not produced, and the fiduciaries who buy CITs live with the consequence. Lifetime income is stuck somewhere else. The effective default in most plans remains the required minimum distribution, and no shelf of guaranteed products repairs a spend-down design that was never built.

Michael Kreps, who co-heads the retirement services practice, said Alsdorf's "background in financial services and practical approach to navigating complex ERISA issues" would be valuable to clients. The client list behind that language reflects the practice's reach: Groom counsels sponsors, fiduciaries and financial institutions on the governance and regulatory questions these products raise.

The bet embedded in the hire is that the next decade of ERISA work is product-design work, a profile that is scarce because it is learned inside a provider rather than a courtroom. It is the profile insurers and recordkeepers reach for when a collective investment trust needs building or a guaranteed-income option needs pricing into a menu. Groom is buying it early; the firms still staffing for the last cycle will be shopping for the same résumé within two years. The next test is the rulemaking. EBSA has reset its ESOP enforcement priorities, and the benchmark question for private assets remains open. Whoever drafts the next round of plan-menu guidance will want lawyers who have read a prospectus as closely as a complaint.