In designing, offering and maintaining attractive and effective employee benefit programs, employers must navigate a complex and everchanging regulatory landscape. Human resources professionals must stay on top of tax, securities and employment law implications of their benefits programs. Our expertise encompasses qualified and non qualified retirement programs, heath and other welfare plans, and fringe benefit plans, and involves design, drafting and operational compliance. We regularly advise employers, their Boards of Directors, and compensation and administrative committees on their fiduciary duty in the administration and management of ERISA plans, and represent these employers and their plans before government agencies and in litigation. Together with other members of the Tax Practice Group, we also advise on worker classification and employment tax matters. This collaboration exemplifies a key strength of our practice group: the close working relationship among experts in all of the related practice areas necessary to the successful implementation and operation of these programs, including tax, labor and employment, corporate and securities, and—at times—bankruptcy and litigation.
Transactional Experience
We have considerable experience in representing our employer clients in connection with business transactions. As part of WilmerHale’s Transactional team, we regularly negotiate the employee–related issues involved in buying or selling a business, including the adapting of employee benefit programs, the continuity of benefit plans, and diligencing and correcting operational issues of target businesses.
Tax-Exempt Employers
We have a premier practice in the representation of colleges, universities, hospitals and other tax-exempt employers. Several of our lawyers practice principally in the tax-exempt sector, and the group’s clients include prominent colleges and universities across the country, major teaching hospitals and unique tax-exempt institutions. We bring to our clients deep experience in the specific issues tax-exempt institutions face, such as the application of intermediate sanctions or the difficult rules applicable to executive compensation.
In these specialized areas, as well as in the ongoing benefit needs of public and private employers, we provide our clients with practical guidance on the application of tax, securities and ERISA law.
In designing, offering and maintaining attractive and effective employee benefit programs, employers must navigate a complex and everchanging regulatory landscape. Human resources professionals must stay on top of tax, securities and employment law implications of their benefits programs. Our expertise encompasses qualified and non qualified retirement programs, heath and other welfare plans, and fringe benefit plans, and involves design, drafting and operational compliance. We regularly advise employers, their Boards of Directors, and compensation and administrative committees on their fiduciary duty in the administration and management of ERISA plans, and represent these employers and their plans before government agencies and in litigation. Together with other members of the Tax Practice Group, we also advise on worker classification and employment tax matters. This collaboration exemplifies a key strength of our practice group: the close working relationship among experts in all of the related practice areas necessary to the successful implementation and operation of these programs, including tax, labor and employment, corporate and securities, and—at times—bankruptcy and litigation.
Transactional Experience
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