Jerry Schlichter
ERISA Fiduciary-Breach · Retirement-Plan Litigation · Worker Rights
“This settlement signifies our commitment to improving the 401(k) savings plans that Americans rely on for a secure retirement.
The Fiduciary Reckoning
Jerry Schlichter turned the hidden arithmetic of retirement-plan fees into a field of worker-rights litigation—and carried its governing principles to three unanimous Supreme Court victories.
The Arithmetic of a Working Life
A fraction of a percent, compounded across a working life, can quietly consume a retirement. Jerry Schlichter turned that arithmetic into a major field of employee-rights litigation. The fees and investment choices inside a 401(k) plan look trivial on a quarterly statement and sit buried in dense financial arrangements; multiplied across decades and an entire workforce, they can drain enormous value from assets held for employees' futures. When Schlichter began filing excessive-fee cases against some of America's largest employers in 2006, no court had ever seriously entertained the theory, the defense bar dismissed the suits as frivolous, and the retirement industry treated its fee structures as beyond scrutiny. Two decades later, the field he invented has produced billions in recoveries, driven fees down across the entire American retirement system, and reached the United States Supreme Court three times — with Schlichter's firm winning unanimously each time.
The man behind that transformation came from a background far removed from Wall Street. A James Scholar graduate of the University of Illinois and an associate editor of the UCLA Law Review, Schlichter built his early career in St. Louis representing injured railroad workers, serving as designated counsel for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and other rail unions. It was classic industrial-era plaintiffs' work — one worker, one injury, one trial — and it taught him how large institutions defend themselves and how long a lawyer must be prepared to fight. When he turned to retirement plans, he brought that endurance with him.
Three Trips to the Supreme Court, Three Unanimous Wins
The doctrinal architecture of modern retirement-fee law bears Schlichter's imprint at the highest level. In Tibble v. Edison International, decided in 2015, he won a 9–0 Supreme Court ruling establishing that an ERISA fiduciary's duty to monitor plan investments is continuing — that a plan sponsor cannot park employees in overpriced funds and then hide behind the statute of limitations because the funds were selected long ago. In Hughes v. Northwestern University, the Court ruled unanimously in 2022 for the plan participants his firm represented, rejecting the premise that imprudent investment options become acceptable merely because a plan also offers sound ones. And in 2025, in Cunningham v. Cornell University, the Court again ruled unanimously for his firm's clients, clarifying the pleading framework for prohibited-transaction claims and preserving participants' ability to test plan arrangements through discovery rather than having cases dismissed at the courthouse door. Three arguments touching the retirement security of tens of millions of Americans; not a single dissenting vote across them.
The trial-court record is equally distinctive. In Tussey v. ABB, one of the first excessive-fee cases ever tried, his firm secured $55 million for plan participants after trial and years of appeals. Abbott v. Lockheed Martin produced a $62 million settlement, then the largest in an excessive-fee case. And in Khan v. Pentegra, his firm did something almost unheard of in ERISA practice: it took a fiduciary-breach case to a jury, winning a $38.8 million verdict in 2024 for roughly 27,000 participants in a multiple-employer plan — a result benefits lawyers immediately began describing as a roadmap for the next generation of retirement litigation, and one followed in 2025 by a settlement resolving the remaining claims. Across the field it created, his firm's recoveries for retirement-plan participants now exceed $1.5 billion.
Money Joined to Reform
What separates Schlichter's litigation model from ordinary class practice is that the money has always come joined to reform. His settlements routinely require changes in recordkeeping arrangements, investment menus, fee disclosure, and fiduciary oversight — governance terms that keep protecting retirement value long after the common fund is distributed. The indirect effects have been larger still. Plan sponsors nationwide, watching the litigation, renegotiated recordkeeping contracts, stripped out retail-priced funds in favor of institutional shares, and began treating fee review as a core fiduciary obligation rather than an afterthought. Fees across the 401(k) system fell measurably in the years after his first wave of cases, a dividend collected by millions of workers who will never know his name and never appear in any class. Few private lawyers can claim to have repriced an entire financial market; Schlichter's cases did precisely that.
The model demanded a rare combination of financial engineering and patience. Excessive-fee cases are expert-intensive, document-heavy, and waged against some of the country's largest employers and financial institutions, with no payment unless the case succeeds — and the early cases took a decade or more to resolve. Schlichter found a way to finance that fight from a St. Louis firm far from the coastal class-action centers, then carried the central fiduciary questions up through the appellate courts until the law itself changed. He brought into the open an injury that accumulates in silence, and established that prudence is measured not by the complexity of the arrangement but by whether those entrusted with workers' savings acted for the workers' benefit.
A Civic Practice
Schlichter's insistence on building durable institutions extends well beyond his docket. In St. Louis he founded Mentor St. Louis, which grew into the largest volunteer program in the city's public schools, and co-founded Arch Grants, a nonprofit that has awarded $50,000 equity-free grants to more than a hundred startups, seeding a new entrepreneurial economy in a city that badly needed one. He spearheaded Missouri's state historic tax credit legislation and the Rebuilding Communities Act, tools that have financed the restoration of downtown St. Louis block by block. He has taught trial techniques as an adjunct professor at Washington University School of Law, and his honors include the St. Louis Award and Washington University's Harris Award, which recognized him with his wife.
Schlichter has represented injured railroad workers, challenged retirement-plan practices affecting entire workforces, and helped secure legislation supporting the rebuilding of St. Louis. In the retirement cases he began bringing in 2006, recovery for participants has come with requirements governing fees, investment choices and fiduciary oversight. Those terms protect savings that will remain in the plans long after a settlement fund has been distributed.