The broker is now a defendant.

What happened in December

On December 23, 2025, Schlichter Bogard LLC filed four nearly identical class actions against LabCorp, United Airlines, CHS/Community Health Systems, and Allied Universal, alleging fiduciary breaches in the administration of voluntary benefits — accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity coverage. That alone would have been notable. What made the filings a genuine turn in the road is who else was named: the employers' brokers and consultants — Willis Towers Watson, Mercer, Gallagher, and Lockton — as defendants in their own right.

If the firm's name sounds familiar, it should. Schlichter Bogard is the plaintiff's firm that built the 401(k) excessive-fee litigation industry, extracting more than $1.5 billion in settlements and permanently changing how retirement plan fiduciaries behave. The playbook that reshaped retirement committees — benchmark everything, document everything, monitor your vendors — is now being run against health and welfare plans. And this time, the people who sold and serviced the plan are inside the blast radius.

The specifics are uncomfortable reading. In the LabCorp complaint, plaintiffs allege the plan's broker collected more than $14 million in commissions over six years while participants paid what the suit characterizes as excessive premiums — and that both the employer and the broker had a duty to monitor, negotiate, and benchmark that they failed to discharge.

The theory: your role makes you a fiduciary

For decades, the industry's working assumption was that brokers and consultants were intermediaries — advisors, not fiduciaries. ERISA's fiduciary definition, however, has always been functional: it turns on what you actually do, not what your title says. The new complaints lean into this. Plaintiffs argue that when consultants exercise discretion in selecting carriers, structuring plans, and setting their own compensation, they are exercising exactly the kind of authority that creates fiduciary status.

If that sounds like a stretch, consider what happened in March. In a separate case, the Oregon Potato Company — a plan sponsor — sued its own brokerage and consultant, and the court refused to dismiss the fiduciary claims even though the service agreement expressly said the firm wasn't acting as a fiduciary. The lesson is blunt: a disclaimer in your services agreement is not a shield. Conduct is.

This didn't come from nowhere

The December filings are the sharp edge of a pressure that has been building for years. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 forced compensation disclosure for group health brokers and consultants, banned the gag clauses that kept claims data locked inside carriers and TPAs, and put employers under attestation obligations. Transparency-in-Coverage rules put negotiated rates into public files. And a first wave of suits against plan sponsors — Johnson & Johnson, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan — tested the theory that employers must actively monitor how their health plans are run.

It's worth being precise here, because precision is the whole point of this moment: most of that first wave was dismissed, largely on standing grounds — courts questioning whether the individual plaintiffs were personally injured, not blessing the underlying conduct. The voluntary-benefits suits are new and untested, and they may face the same hurdles. But standing dismissals don't make questions disappear; they refine the next complaint. Law firms across the defense bar are telling clients the same thing: expect more of these, aimed at employers, brokers, and consultants alike.

What courts actually ask for

Here is the part that should change how you run your book — and it's better news than the headlines suggest. ERISA does not require perfect outcomes, the cheapest vendor, or clairvoyance. As one defense-side analysis of the new wave puts it, what the law requires is "a reasoned, diligent decision-making process" — applied not once at selection, but continuously. The allegations in these suits are not that anyone picked the wrong carrier. They are allegations of passivity: no benchmarking, no market testing, no scrutiny of compensation, no documented review — for years.

That reframes the risk entirely. The exposure isn't advising a client whose plan has problems. Every plan has problems. The exposure is having no record that anyone looked.

The uncomfortable part for brokers

There's a tension in this moment that deserves naming. The way brokers win business is by claiming influence: we negotiate harder, we oversee the vendors, we steer the plan. The way brokers have historically avoided fiduciary exposure is by disclaiming influence. The new litigation collapses that distinction — plaintiffs are quoting the industry's own value proposition back to it as evidence of discretion.

You cannot market oversight and practice passivity. The gap between the two is exactly where these complaints live. Which means the durable answer isn't to shrink the claim — it's to make the oversight real, and to make it provable.

What a defensible book looks like

Translated out of legalese, the emerging standard asks brokers for four habits:

• Benchmark on a calendar, not a feeling. Carriers, TPAs, PBMs — and your own compensation — reviewed against the market on a documented cycle, not when a client asks.
• Verify administration, not just pricing. Renewal work has always asked "are we paying the right rate?" The new question is "is the plan being run the way the documents say?" — and it's the question no spreadsheet answers.
• Put findings in writing, every time. A gap you found, flagged, and tracked to resolution is evidence of diligence. The identical gap, undocumented, is evidence of neglect. Same fact — opposite meaning.
• Make oversight a deliverable your client can hold. A standing, written record of plan review does double duty: it discharges your client's duty to monitor, and it is the clearest possible demonstration of what your fee buys — at exactly the moment CAA disclosure has put that fee under a microscope.

Notice what this list is not. It is not "carry more insurance and hope." E&O responds to a claim; it doesn't prevent one, and it doesn't win a finalist meeting. The brokers who convert this era into growth will be the ones who treat scrutiny as a product — who walk into the stewardship meeting with the review already done, documented, and cited, while their competitors are still promising to be trusted.

This article is for general information only and is not legal advice. The lawsuits discussed contain allegations, not findings; several earlier suits in this line were dismissed, and the voluntary-benefits cases are in early stages. Consult qualified ERISA counsel about your specific obligations.