Covington’s Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation group addresses all areas of the law relevant to employee benefits and executive compensation, including taxation, fiduciary responsibility, labor relations, employment discrimination, securities regulation, corporate governance, and health care regulation. We advise companies, directors, and executives on incentive and equity compensation arrangements designed to attract and retain top-level talent. We handle pension investments and the employee benefit aspects of business transactions, and we provide expert advice on SEC reporting and disclosure requirements.
As counsel to The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC), the voice for over 100 large public companies, we are directly involved in the most significant legislative, regulatory, and public policy issues affecting employee benefits. Our senior lawyers have served as Deputy Secretary of Labor; Solicitor of Labor; Associate Benefits Tax Counsel in the Treasury Department; Deputy General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services; Director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Chief Counsel to the Senate Finance Committee.
We handle a wide variety of employee benefits litigation and contested agency proceedings. We have won large class actions involving hundreds of millions of dollars and benefit claims brought by individual employees. We have successfully represented clients in audits, investigations, and enforcement proceedings brought by the IRS, the Labor Department, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the SEC, and the EEOC, and in challenges to plans’ tax-qualified status in U.S. Tax Court.