Bailey Glasser Heads Back to Supreme Court for Intel ERISA Appeal
The Supreme Court of the United States granted the petition for certiorari filed by Bailey & Glasser, LLP and co-counsel on behalf of clients Winston Anderson and Christopher Sulyma in their ongoing case against the Intel Corporation and the Intel fiduciaries responsible for investing Intel’s retirement plans. The plaintiffs allege that the defendants mismanaged retirement plan assets by stuffing target date funds in the Intel plans with expensive, opaque, and esoteric private equity and hedge fund investments. These outlier investments caused Intel employees to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in retirement savings.
Gregory Porter, BG’s ERISA Practice Group Leader and leading co-counsel in this case, said, “This case presents a critical opportunity to clarify how courts evaluate fiduciary decision-making in complex retirement-plan investments, particularly as plans increasingly incorporate alternative and nontraditional assets.”
In addition to Greg Porter, the petition was filed by Bailey Glasser’s nationally recognized ERISA litigation team, which includes partners Mark Boyko and Ryan Jenny, as well as co-counsel from Gupta Wessler LLP and The Barton Firm LLP.
Plaintiffs, long-time Intel employees and participants in the company’s retirement plans, allege that Intel’s plan fiduciaries violated their duties of prudence and loyalty under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). The complaint contends that the fiduciaries invested billions of dollars of plan assets in unproven, high-risk, and illiquid alternative investments, such as hedge funds and private equity, through custom target-date and multi-asset funds, exposing participants to unnecessary risk and underperformance relative to traditional retirement investment options.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case, holding that the complaint did not plausibly allege imprudence or disloyalty because it failed to identify “meaningful benchmarks” for comparing the Intel funds’ performance. In May 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed, concluding that ERISA plaintiffs must identify comparator funds with similar objectives, risks, and rewards to support claims of imprudent investment even when no such benchmark exists because no similarly-situated fiduciaries embarked on such reckless conduct.
Plaintiffs ask the Supreme Court to address an important question under ERISA’s “prudent person standard of care,” which requires fiduciaries to manage retirement plan assets with the same care, skill, and diligence that a prudent expert would use in similar circumstances. Specifically, the petition challenges the Ninth Circuit’s “meaningful benchmark” rule, requiring plaintiffs to compare a plan’s investments to a nearly identical alternative fund to show mismanagement, even if no such comparable fund exists. The petition argues that this rigid rule conflicts with ERISA’s plain language and the Supreme Court’s prior rulings in Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer and Hughes v. Northwestern University, which make clear that fiduciary prudence must be evaluated based on context and circumstances, not categorical pleading requirements.
The lower case is Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee et al. (Case No. 5:19-cv-04618, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California).
This is the second time this case has reached the Supreme Court. In 2020, a unanimous court held that defendants must prove the plaintiff had actual, not constructive, knowledge of his claims. Intel Corp. Inv. Pol. Comm. v. Sulyma, 589 U.S. 178 (2020). The case is especially timely given the recent regulatory and legislative push to allow private equity, crypto and other exotic investments into 401(k) plans.
Read a Law360 article about this important appeal at this link.
Bailey Glasser's ERISA team is recognized for its dedicated work. Gregory Porter, the ERISA Practice Group Leader, has received top rankings for his ERISA work by the global legal ranking company Chambers & Partners, and the Practice Group is Chambers ranked as well on the national level. The group as a whole is also on the Best Law Firms® National Tier for ERISA litigation, as well as Tier One in Washington, D.C. for the same practice.