< 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

1. Bruce Rauner Illinois 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation Sponsored Unsustainable Debt: Is There a Path for Policymakers and Institutional Investors? Sponsored by Fidelity Investments October 16, 2025 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