The 2015 Pension 40: Ian Lanoff

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< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

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Ian Lanoff
Principal / Groom Law Group
Last year: Not ranked

The pension landscape has changed a lot since Ian Lanoff, 73, ran the ERISA program at the Department of Labor under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Since leaving Capitol Hill in the early 1980s, Lanoff, an attorney at Washington-based Groom Law Group, has handled employee benefit matters for many pension fund boards, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the New York State Employees Retirement System (known as the Common Fund) and the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System. Lanoff helped develop the so-called everything-being-equal approach, which allows pensions to invest with a social purpose only as long as everything else about their process was sound. That work culminated in new DoL guidance in October saying that fiduciaries cannot take on higher risk or accept lower returns in an effort to achieve environmental, social responsibility and corporate governance goals. ESG benefits should instead be viewed as “tiebreakers” when multiple investments are otherwise equal in terms of financial outcome. Lanoff, who participated in the talks that led to the change, says he is mostly happy with the outcome: “The main problem I had was with some people who were arguing in favor of altering the everything-being-equal test and coming up with a test where social considerations can be considered on a level with risk and returns.” That doesn’t work from a legal perspective because trust law prohibits sacrificing fiduciary duty for nonfinancial considerations, he says. But Lanoff, who serves on the board of the Pension Rights Center (see Karen Ferguson and Karen Friedman, No. 22), admits many of his colleagues view his position as too conservative. “I’m a lawyer, not a policymaker,” he says.

The 2015 Pension 40