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Jack Lund

Jack Lund is an associate in the firm’s Washington, DC office where he is a member of the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation practice group. Jack advises clients on all aspects of employee benefits including tax-qualified retirement plans, health and welfare plans, Individual Retirement Arrangements, global incentive plans, executive compensation, ERISA litigation, and corporate transactions. In so doing, Jack is particularly adept at designing and implementing comprehensive strategies that solve his clients’ most difficult regulatory and legislative problems.

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On January 5, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) issued a groundbreaking proposed rule that would, if finalized:

  • prohibit most employers from entering into non-compete clauses with workers, including employees and individual independent contractors;
  • prohibit such employers from maintaining non-compete clauses with workers or representing to a worker that the worker is subject to a non-compete clause; and
  • require employers to rescind any existing non-compete clause with workers by the compliance date of the rule and notify the affected workers that their non-compete clause is no longer in effect.

The FTC’s notice of proposed rulemaking explains that the FTC considered possible limitations on the rule—such as excluding senior executives or highly paid employees from the ban—but it ultimately proposed a categorical ban on post-termination non-competes.  The only exception is for non-competes related to the sale of a business.  However, even this exception is unusually narrow: it would only apply to selling business owners who own at least 25% percent of the business being sold.  (The proposal also would not apply to most non-profits, certain financial institutions, common carriers, and others who are also outside the scope of FTC regulation.)Continue Reading FTC Proposes Rule to Ban Most Non-Competes

Last night (Wednesday, March 18, 2020) the President signed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act after it passed the Senate in the afternoon by a vote of 90-8.  The Act requires all private health plans to cover COVID-19 diagnostic testing—coverage that most insured and large self-insured health plans already are providing.  The Act also requires employers with fewer than 500 employees to provide up to ten weeks of paid FMLA leave and two weeks of paid sick leave to employees affected by COVID-19.  For small employers subject to these new leave mandates, the Act provides tax credits to help offset the cost of the mandates.  This means that the tax credits are not available to employers with 500 or more employees, even if they provide paid leave equal to or in excess of that required of smaller employers under the Act.  It is noteworthy that the Senate voted down amendments that would have expanded the bill’s paid FMLA leave or replaced the bill’s paid leave with state unemployment benefits.
Continue Reading Impact of New Coronavirus Mandatory Leave and Testing Legislation Largely Limited to Smaller Employers

On July 10, 2019, the Sixth Circuit considered vexing questions of statutory interpretation in an ERISA case.  A dispute over whether a transaction bonus plan was an ERISA employee pension benefit plan hinged on the meaning of two terms common in federal statutes: “results in” and “extending to.”  While the meaning of the statute was plain to the entire panel, Judges Stranch and Thapar quarreled over the evidence that a court might rightly consider when interpreting a statute—in this case, ERISA.  Judge Thapar argues that “[c]ourts should consider adding [corpus linguistics] to their tool belts.”
Continue Reading Corpus Linguistics and ERISA Litigation

Our own Richard Shea and Jack Lund recently contributed a post to the RetireSecure Blog maintained by the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  The post discusses the competing rhetoric surrounding the impact of proposed financial transaction taxes on the American retirement system.
Continue Reading Retirement Savings as a Political Cudgel in the Debate over FTTs