Professor Colleen Medill, along with Professors Paula Schaefer and Alex Long of The University of Tennessee College of Law, presented a teaching workshop, Integrating (and Assessing) Lawyering Skills in the 1L Curriculum, at the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning’s annual June conference. This year’s conference, entitled “Real World Readiness,” accepted a limited number of teaching workshop proposals from law school faculty around the country on how law schools can better prepare students to enter the real world of law practice. Professor Medill’s teaching workshop focused on first year Property, Civil Procedure, and Torts classes. The workshop demonstrated how to integrate various professional skills assignments that place students in the role of the lawyer into a traditional classroom course. These assignments are designed not only to introduce legal skills like drafting, client counseling, and negotiation, but also to help students better understand the contextual application of the law in legal practice. Professor Medill’s portion of the demonstration workshop focused on the first year Property course using the skills exercises from her supplemental book, Developing Professional Skills: Property, which she uses to teach her Property students at the College of Law.
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Professor Colleen Medill was a featured presenter at the Experiential Innovation Summit: Incorporating Skills Throughout the Law School Curriculum, an invitation-only conference sponsored by West Academic Publishing held July 18-20 at West’s corporate headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. The purpose of the Summit was to gather together law school faculty who are nationally recognized leaders in experiential learning for three days of presentations, brain-storming, and informal conversations on the latest trends in curriculum reform and professional skills training for law students. Professor Medill’s presentation focused on overcoming the perceived obstacles to incorporating legal skills exercises in large section doctrinal courses. Her presentation explained various techniques that can be used to assess student performance on negotiation, drafting, and client counseling skills exercises for first year law students. Professor Medill is the creator and series editor for West’s Developing Professional Skills book series, and the author of Developing Professional Skills: Property, which she uses to teach professional skills in her first year Property course.
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Professor Colleen Medill’s article, Comparing ERISA and Fair Labor Standards Act Claims Under the Affordable Care Act, has been accepted for publication by the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal. The article explains how the employer mandate under the Affordable Care Act creates incentives for retaliatory employment actions by employers, and then compares and contrasts the strategic advantages and disadvantages of asserting employee claims under ERISA Section 510 and Fair Labor Standards Act Section 18C. The article concludes by discussing the major factors that initially should be evaluated for each type of claim when determining the plaintiff’s litigation strategy.
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Professor Colleen Medill’s article, Regulating ERISA Fiduciary Outsourcing, has been accepted for publication in Volume 102 of the Iowa Law Review. Professor Medill’s interest in the outsourcing of fiduciary functions by employers who sponsor benefit plans for their employees dates back to June of 2014, when she was asked to testify on current industry trends and emerging legal issues by the Department of Labor’s ERISA Advisory Council. The Council’s final report to the Secretary of Labor, which can be found here: http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/publications/2014ACreport3.html, highlighted her testimony as particularly relevant and helpful to the Council.
The abstract below describes the content of the article:
Pension and welfare benefit plans sponsored by private employers are big business. The sponsorship of these plans is the most heavily tax-subsidized private economic activity in the entire federal budget, with an estimated loss in federal tax revenues due to special tax breaks of over $1.485 trillion for the budget period 2014-2018. In exchange for these special tax breaks, the federal government heavily regulates these private plans. To cope with the complexity, employers increasingly hire outside professional fiduciaries to run their employee benefit plans so that they can concentrate on running their businesses. Although this outsourcing of plan management and administrative functions is now widespread, almost no federal regulation applies to these fiduciary outsourcing arrangements. As evidenced by a 2014 report issued by the Department of Labor's ERISA Advisory Council, both employers and the professional fiduciary services industry want and need more guidance in the form of regulation. The need for regulation has become even more urgent in light of the Supreme Court’s subsequent 2015 decision in Tibble v. Edison International, which further encourages employers to outsource plan asset management functions. This Article explains and analyzes the unresolved issues that have emerged in this complex area of law and proposes specific solutions to better regulate fiduciary outsourcing arrangements.