Schlichter Bogard & Denton LLP have come to terms with the defendants in another excessive fee suit – just four days before the case was scheduled to go to trial.
BB&T and a potential class of as many as 67,000 current and former workers came to terms after a pretrial telephone conference before U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Eagles. The parties will have 30 days to seek preliminary approval of their settlement, the terms of which were not included in the minute entry posted Thursday.
The case is actually two cases that were consolidated in November 2015 – Burke Bowers et al. v. BB&T Corp. et al., case number 1:15-cv-00732, and Brewster Smith Jr. et al. v. BB&T Corp., case number 1:15-cv-00841 – both in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
The suits allege that fiduciary responsibilities were breached both in causing the plan to pay BB&T excessive administrative fees and providing imprudent and unreasonably expensive investment options – that the defendants used a BB&T company to provide plan trustee and recordkeeping services without any competitive bidding process and allowed that company to take excessive compensation (via revenue-sharing) from the plan at the expense of plan participants – and that the defendants failed to monitor the amount of revenue sharing that was paid or have BB&T return to the plan such amounts as exceeded a reasonable administrative fee…“…millions of dollars in excessive recordkeeping fees,” according to the suit.
Class ‘Actions’
BB&T is the latest financial company to agree to settle such claims, joining Deutsche Bank ($21.9 million), American Airlines Group Inc. ($22 million), Allianz SE ($12 million) and TIAA ($5 million).
Interestingly enough, a case cited in a number of these settlement filings as indicative of the uncertain nature of plaintiffs prevailing in similar cases – Brotherston v. Putnam Investments, LLC– where the Putnam defendants initially prevailed in the district court – just had that decision ordered for review by the appellate court.
As for the current case, the parties have until Nov. 26 to submit details, including the settlement’s amount, according to the case docket.
Nichols Kaster PLLP, Puryear & Lingle PLLC, and Schlichter Bogard & Denton LLP represent the plaintiffs in the BB&T suit, while Womble Bond Dickinson LLP, and Groom Law Group Chartered represent BB&T.
The case is Sims v. BB&T Corp., M.D.N.C., No. 1:15-cv-00732-CCE-JEP, minute entry 10/25/18.
