Practice Areas & Industries: Jones Day

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Employee benefit plan assets are an attractive source of investment capital. Jones Day has comprehensive knowledge of the ERISA requirements and constraints that apply to those seeking access to these assets, as well as those looking to invest them. This knowledge, along with our extensive experience with the investment funds and transactions involved, permits highly skilled representation of clients participating in these funds and transactions.

Our facility with the application of the ERISA plan asset rules and our profound understanding of investment funds and their operation allow us to help clients establish funds designed to attract plan assets and to assist clients investing such assets. In this regard, while working with other Jones Day lawyers to establish such funds, we have advised clients on how to comply with ERISA fiduciary and prohibited transaction rules by structuring limited partnerships or limited liability companies with the general partner or managing member as a qualified professional asset manager. Similarly, we have assisted venture capital, private equity, and real estate clients to establish funds that are designed to take advantage of ERISA plan asset exceptions so that the investment of the fund assets is not subject to ERISA and the fund managers are not ERISA fiduciaries. In other situations, we have guided the investment of plan assets by clients through ERISA's myriad requirements.

In these engagements, we balance the interests of benefit plan investors and fund managers in navigating ERISA's plan asset rules to achieve a structure with investment flexibility for the managers and appropriate safeguards for the benefit plan investors.

We also regularly work with Jones Day corporate lawyers on structured finance transactions involving, securitizations and swaps. We scrutinize these financings to ensure that the assets of the special-purpose vehicles involved do not become ERISA plan assets and that the sales of securities issued by such SPVs do not constitute prohibited transactions under ERISA.

Contact(s)

Jeffrey S. Leavitt
Cleveland
Tel: 1.216.586.3939