Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation
Clients benefit from our strong commitment to, and a long history of, service to businesses of all sizes in the highly specialized area of employee benefits (EB). Our EB attorneys have a background and education in tax law, accounting, and general employment law, proving to be extremely useful in addressing the complex and diverse EB matters of our clients. We represent large public companies exclusively in the area of EB law, partnering with these companies’ in-house counsel and other outside legal service providers in a team approach, as well as serving closely-held business and business owners.
Our firm’s EB practice began in earnest in the 1940s, long before ERISA, designing and implementing pension and other benefits plans for employers of all sizes. Our EB lawyers are focused on benefit cost containment for clients (particularly with self-funded medical plans), and on the importance of competitively designed compensation/benefit programs to enhance employee recruiting and retention.
Members of our EB team provide a number of services to our clients in many areas, including:
- Assisting clients with the development of employee benefit strategies to assist in attracting, motivating and retaining a high quality work force.
- Consolidating employee benefit plans for clients involved in merger and acquisition transactions to ensure continuity of benefits to employees.
- Counseling clients regarding the benefits and drawbacks of various benefit options, including all aspects of executive compensation, non-qualified retirement programs, stock options and other equity-based opportunities.
- Designing and implementing qualified and non-qualified retirement plans, executive compensation programs, cafeteria plans and other employee benefit plans.
- Planning for retirement plan distributions.
Representative Clients include:
- AK Steel Corporation
- Fifth Third Bank
- Battelle Memorial Institute
- Regent Communications, Inc.
- Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati
- SENCORP
- Hilltop Basic Resources, Inc.
- LaRosa Corporation
- Grote Industries, Inc.
- Rotex, Inc.
- The Motz Group
Because our employee benefits practice is governed primarily by federal law, we are able to serve businesses around the country very well from our offices, centrally located in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. While this body of law is not locally driven, our EB attorneys recognize the absolute necessity of understanding our clients’ businesses, the local benefits community in which they compete for employees, the jobs performed by employees for whom benefit programs are designed to retain, and the available local providers and networks. This hands-on approach greatly enhances our ability to more effectively serve our clients, wherever they are located. The firm’s state of the art technology for document management and transmittal has no boundaries and is particularly critical to our EB practice because it is so document intensive.