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Seyfarth Shaw LLP
Practical Law Panel Firm: Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation
| Maintained |
Contact Information
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233 S WACKER DR STE 8000
CHICAGO, IL 60606-6448, USA
T: +1 (312) 460-5000
F: +1 (312) 460-7000
With a national capacity of approximately 60 benefits and executive compensation lawyers, and drawing upon the resources of more than 350 lawyers who specialize in ERISA litigation or labor and employment matters, Seyfarth Shaw has one of largest and most comprehensive Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation departments in the country. This dedicated, stand-alone, department supports the legal and human resource functions of hundreds of employers within the Fortune 1000, as well as many large non-profit university and hospital systems and US subsidiaries of foreign multinationals. Consistent with the Seyfarth heritage, this practice is relationship-driven; with a focus on supporting our clients’ ongoing needs related to the multi-faceted aspects of establishing, maintaining, revising and terminating their retirement, health and welfare benefit, executive compensation and incentive plans.
Ours is a highly regulated and complicated specialty. Critical elements of an employer's legal and human resource functions are to design and effect plan changes that address an employer's regulatory, business and employee relations considerations. This area has become increasingly risk sensitive, with monetary, employee and public relations implications.
Our clients look to us for strategic planning, business advice, and ongoing technical legal support. We aim to meet these expectations in a cost effective manner and with practical awareness. Our mission—to be the “go-to” firm for day-to-day employee benefits legal services—and the structural aspects of our employee benefits and executive compensation practice sets us apart.
Structuring ourselves to effect our mission we:
- Align attorneys by internal specialty groups (or "POD"s), such as Executive Compensation, Defined Benefit Plans, Fiduciary Advisory Services, and Multi-Employer Retirement and Welfare Benefit Plans. Each specialty group keeps current with developments in its area and is responsible for any related training of our lawyers, as well as providing educational materials and seminars to our clients and contacts. This POD framework ensures we maintain proficiency in legal and best practice developments.
- Interact regularly with our Labor & Employment Department, one of the largest in the United States. Accordingly, we bring an employee relations sensitivity to our day-to-day client interactions.
- Provide clients with regular updates and analyses covering developments in the law and, when warranted, hold free client webinars that cover developments in more detail. These services afford our clients both the information needed to handle day-to-day operations and the opportunity to react quickly to developments that affect their specific arrangements.
- Represent our clients on the benefit aspects of their corporate transactions (both domestic and international) and often act as special counsel in mergers and acquisitions, divestments, and joint ventures, partnering with legal, consulting, and other professionals.
- Support our domestic clients with respect to their cross-border employee benefit and executive compensation matters; as well as advise businesses and professionals from outside the United States as to domestic benefit and compensatory matters, including matters involving employees in other countries who are subject to US laws.
- Develop cutting-edge legal processes that reduce our clients’ legal expenditures, through the firm's investment in SeyfarthLean, a methodology based upon Six Sigma and related process-improvement methodologies. This has resulted in a different way of thinking about—and executing on—the delivery of legal services to bring clients consistent quality while providing budget predictability. This committed pricing approach has been applied in the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Department in areas such as benefit plan restatements, plan terminations, qualified domestic relations order (QDRO) processing, qualified medical child support order (QMCSO) processing, 50-state reviews of legal instruments, and others.