Kai H. Richter
Pensions · 401(k)s · ESOPs · Employee-Benefits Litigation
I became a lawyer to advocate for justice and the common good, not serve as a hired gun.
Evidence That Lives in the Fine Print
Kai H. Richter develops the financial record behind pension, 401(k), ESOP, and health-benefit disputes while protecting plan-wide remedies on appeal.
Evidence That Lives in the Fine Print
The decisive evidence in Kai H. Richter's cases rarely lives in anyone's memory — it lives in actuarial assumptions, plan language, investment structure, and the timing of a benefit calculation. A retiree cannot testify to the mortality table that shrank her annuity; a 401(k) participant never saw the recordkeeping contract that skimmed his account. Richter's practice is built on developing that financial record at the trial level while watching the appellate doctrines that determine whether participants will ever get a merits hearing at all, and whether a remedy can be administered accurately across an entire plan. Few lawyers in the country work both ends of that problem with equal fluency, which is why, from an office in Minneapolis rather than either coast, he has become one of the plaintiffs' bar's essential ERISA litigators.
His route to the work ran through public service. After graduating cum laude from Dartmouth College and then, again cum laude, from the University of Minnesota Law School, Richter litigated in the Office of General Counsel of the Federal Election Commission — an apprenticeship in cases where the stakes are institutional and the record is documentary — and later managed the Complex Litigation Division of the Minnesota Attorney General's Office. The experience sharpened both his sense of public responsibility and his feel for procedural structure: how a case must be framed at the start to survive to the end. He then spent years as a partner and practice leader at a national plaintiffs' firm, where courts appointed him class counsel in more than two dozen ERISA class actions before he brought his practice to Cohen Milstein's employee-benefits group.
Deriving the Shortfall
The signature of Richter's recent work is recovery for injuries that had to be derived rather than observed. He helped obtain the $19 million settlement for participants in New York Life's retirement plans, granted final approval in July 2024, in litigation over the company's use of in-house funds for its own employees' savings. He was counsel for more than 1,700 Citgo retirees and participants whose pensions had been quietly diminished by outdated actuarial assumptions — a shortfall invisible on any pay stub, recoverable only by reconstructing what the benefit formula should have produced — in litigation that ended in settlement. In the WBBQ ESOP litigation, a proposed $22.5 million settlement received preliminary approval in May 2026, in a case turning on what employee-owners actually paid for company stock. And in long-running pension litigation involving AT&T, his team pressed the case through a summary-judgment ruling that largely went the participants' way before reaching a settlement in the spring of 2026. In each matter, the injury could not be read off an ordinary wage ledger; it had to be excavated from the governing documents, the calculation methods, and the moment when the plan converted those terms into an individual benefit.
The appellate side of his practice guards the door to all of it. In Harrison v. Envision Management, Richter's team persuaded the Tenth Circuit in 2023 to refuse enforcement of an arbitration provision that would have stripped ESOP participants of the plan-wide remedies ERISA promises them — and when the defendants sought Supreme Court review, the Court declined, leaving the participants' case free to proceed. The win produced no fund and no headline number; what it preserved was the possibility of every number that might follow. That is the quiet economy of benefits litigation as Richter practices it: standing, arbitration, and the scope of fiduciary duty decide whether the financial record is ever tested, and a lawyer who cedes those questions has ceded the case.
Three Plain Questions
Benefit litigation demands more than spotting a mathematical difference. The gap must be tied to a fiduciary decision, the decision to the person who controlled the process, and the remedy to a form that can be applied accurately plan-wide — across thousands of accounts, each with its own history of contributions, elections, and distributions. Richter's discipline is to distill those layers into three plain questions: what were employees promised, what did the plan calculate, and what does federal law require the fiduciary to deliver? The framing is deceptively simple. Behind it sits the expert work of economists and actuaries, the parsing of decades-old plan amendments, and the construction of damages models robust enough to survive both a defense challenge and the practical test of administration. When his settlements are approved, the money actually reaches the retirees it was calculated for — a detail that separates durable class practice from the merely dramatic kind.
His docket now extends to the newest frontier of the field: the fiduciary duties that govern health benefits. Pending matters include claims over prescription-drug costs in JPMorgan Chase's health plan and claims involving Wells Fargo's health coverage — cases asking whether the same legal duties that discipline retirement plans also require employers to manage the health-care dollars of their workforces prudently. The questions are unfolding now in the courts, and they may define employee-benefits law for the next decade the way excessive-fee litigation defined its last one. It is characteristic of Richter to be there at the start, building the record that later rulings will stand on.
Teaching the Structure
Richter has always treated the profession itself as something to be maintained. At the University of Minnesota Law School he co-directs the Robert F. Wagner Labor Law Moot Court Program, coaching students through the appellate craft his own cases depend on; he has taught legal writing as an adjunct, co-chaired the Minnesota State Bar Association's Consumer Litigation Section, and become a regular voice on ERISA developments for the American Law Institute, the American Bar Association, and other professional bodies.
Richter's commitment to justice and the common good has taken him from government service to court-appointed representation of retirement-plan participants and litigation over employee health benefits. For the people represented in those cases, the result can be a corrected pension calculation, money restored to an account, or enforcement of a benefit promised in plan language.