This content is from: Corner Office
The 2015 Pension 40: Ian Lanoff
No. 29 Ian Lanoff, Principal / Groom Law Grou


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.
![]() 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation ![]() 3. Chris Christie New Jersey ![]() 4. Randi Weingarten AmericanFederation of Teachers ![]() 5. Phyllis Borzi U.S. Department of Labor |
![]() 6. Kevin de León California ![]() 7. Alejandro García Padilla Commonwealth ofPuerto Rico ![]() 8. Laurence Fink BlackRock ![]() 9. Rahm Emanuel Chicago ![]() 10. Sean McGarvey North AmericanBuilding Trades Unions |
![]() 11. John Kline Minnesota ![]() 12. J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department ![]() 13. Damon Silvers AFL-CIO ![]() 14. Jeffrey Immelt General Electric Co. ![]() 15. Joshua Gotbaum Brookings Institution |
![]() 16. Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. ![]() 17. Mark Mullet Washington ![]() 18. Terry O'Sullivan Laborers' International Union of North America ![]() 19. Raymond Dalio Bridgewater Associates ![]() 20. Ted Wheeler Oregon |
![]() 21. Thomas Nyhan Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund ![]() 22. Karen Ferguson & Karen Friedman Pensions Rights Center ![]() 23. Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee forMultiemployer Plans ![]() 24. Robert O'Keef Motorola Solutions ![]() 25. Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley |
![]() 26. Kenneth Feinberg The Law Offices of Kenneth R. Feinberg ![]() 27. Orrin Hatch Utah ![]() 28. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University ![]() 29. Ian Lanoff Groom Law Group ![]() 30. Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business |
![]() 31. Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees' Retirement System ![]() 32. Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services ![]() 33. Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research ![]() 34. Denise Nappier Connecticut ![]() 35. W. Thomas Reeder Jr. Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp. |
![]() 36. Hank Kim National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems ![]() 37. Paul Singer Elliott Management Corp. ![]() 38. Bailey Childers National PublicPension Coalition ![]() 39. Amy Kessler Prudential Financial ![]() 40. Judy Mares U.S. Labor Department |