Michelle C. Yau

The Hidden Injury

No one has to touch a paycheck to shrink a pension. A conflicted transaction, an imprudent investment, a faulty actuarial assumption, an unlawful reduction — each can cut deep into assets reserved for an employee's future, and Michelle C. Yau represents the employees and retirees on the losing end. As chair of Cohen Milstein's Employee Benefits and ERISA practice, she has built one of the country's most consequential dockets of retirement litigation by mastering the machinery that determines what a benefit is worth: valuation models, mortality tables, plan documents, and the fiduciary decisions buried inside them. The numbers her cases produce — $219 million here, $100 million there — are striking, but the deeper achievement is translation. Yau takes injuries that accumulate invisibly, in instruments most workers never read, and makes them legible to a court, a jury, and the workers themselves.

Her preparation for that work was unusually literal. A first-generation American whose immigrant father urged her to get a job and enter the real world before law school, Yau spent her early twenties as a financial analyst in Goldman Sachs's investment banking division, working on mergers, acquisitions, and public offerings. "I experienced firsthand the immense pressure on Wall Street for corporations to push for greater and greater profits," she has said, and the lesson stayed with her when she left for Harvard Law School, where she held a Heyman Fellowship after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar. During high school and law school she taught English as a second language to immigrants, and the two experiences fused into a vocation: "I understood that America's workers needed someone in their corner fighting to make them visible to these profit-driven institutions." Four years as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Labor completed the toolkit, giving her a regulator's command of ERISA before she ever filed a private case.

From Madoff's Wreckage to the Church Plans

The results have compounded across two decades. Early in her Cohen Milstein tenure, Yau worked on the ERISA litigation arising from the Beacon funds' exposure to Bernard Madoff's fraud, which contributed to approximately $219 million in relief for pension plans caught in the collapse. She was counsel in the litigation over Dignity Health's retirement plans — part of a wave of cases testing whether sprawling hospital systems could claim the "church plan" exemption and run pension plans outside ERISA's funding protections — which settled with a package valued at $100 million. When Wells Fargo was alleged to have steered its own employees' 401(k) savings into proprietary funds that benefited the bank, she helped secure a $32.5 million settlement for the plan's participants. A $19 million resolution involving New York Life's in-house funds followed in 2024.

Her ESOP work shows the practice at its most forensic. In the Triad Manufacturing litigation, employee retirement accounts had been used to buy company stock in a transaction valuing the shares at roughly $106 million — stock the plan's own subsequent valuation put at a small fraction of that figure almost immediately afterward. The case produced a $14.8 million settlement, roughly $43,000 for each affected employee, and along the way a Seventh Circuit ruling that refused to let an arbitration clause written into the plan extinguish participants' statutory remedies — a decision that has protected the ability of employee-owners everywhere to get plan-wide relief. Her team pressed the same principle in the Tenth Circuit in litigation involving Envision Management Holding, where the court declined to enforce an arbitration provision that would have barred classwide remedies and the Supreme Court left the victory standing.

Actuarial Tables and Economic Justice

Perhaps no case captures Yau's method better than the pension litigation for Citgo retirees. The company had been calculating certain benefits using mortality assumptions dating to the 1970s — tables built on the life expectancies of a workforce that no longer existed — quietly shortchanging roughly 1,700 pensioners on the annuities their years of service had earned. Finding that injury required actuarial archaeology; proving it required making a court care about the difference between one mortality table and another. The litigation resolved in 2025 with a $14.75 million settlement, and it illustrates the conviction at the center of her practice: technical complexity must never serve as a shelter. A small change to an interest rate, a valuation assumption, or a recurring fee can materially shrink retirement income when applied across years and thousands of participants, and Yau's cases exist to make that accumulated toll undeniable. Deterrence, in her view, is the point. "By making them pay where it counts: their bottom line, this deters companies from violating the law," she has said.

The breadth of the docket keeps growing at the edges of the field. Her practice group's recent matters have pushed into new terrain — including litigation raising climate-related fiduciary questions and a continuing stream of ESOP valuation cases — while the core work of restoring plan assets and reforming plan governance continues. In each matter, the remedy is designed to outlast the check: strengthened oversight, corrected assumptions, and governance terms that protect the plans on which workers stake their futures.

The Standard-Setter

What holds it all together is her sense of what a pension actually is. Behind every actuarial table stands a machinist, a nurse, a refinery operator who traded present wages for a promise about old age. The institutions holding that promise are sophisticated, well-advised, and under constant pressure to favor their own interests; the workers, almost by definition, cannot see what is happening to their money until it is too late. Yau has spent twenty years standing in that gap — fluent in the language of the institutions, loyal to the people they serve — and the retirement system is measurably more honest for it.