Benefits and Compensation

Latham & Watkins' Benefits and Compensation Practice offers a full range of transactional services as well as ongoing counsel on benefits and compensation matters to employers worldwide. Our attorneys’ significant experience and expertise regarding the laws and regulations that govern benefits and compensation matters enable the firm to offer focused, comprehensive and practical advice on design and compliance issues in a number of jurisdictions, including the US. According to the Legal 500 US 2010 guide, “The team of ‘highly skilled and experienced practitioners’ has a full range of transactional and advisory services, with particular expertise in the tax and regulatory aspects of both designing and administering executive compensation arrangements and employee benefit plans, including ERISA structuring.”                                                                                   

We work with businesses and their officers, boards and compensation committees in all facets of designing, drafting, implementing and administering executive compensation arrangements and employee benefit plans. In these matters, we employ our expertise in the relevant tax, employment, corporate, securities and stock exchange laws and regulations, as well as our knowledge of accounting issues, customary compensation practice and benchmarks, and best corporate governance practices, to provide our clients with holistic and practical advice.

Our group also plays an integral role in corporate merger, acquisition and divestiture transactions, as well as corporate finance, bankruptcy and workout transactions, advising on identifying and disposing of assets and liabilities inherent in compensation and benefit plans, planning opportunities relating to integrating work forces and benefit plans and strategies for negotiating these issues in the transaction. We also work with our Latham colleagues in various corporate and finance practice groups in structuring investment funds and securities for our clients in order to qualify them for acquisition by US pension plans under the US Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and with our colleagues in the firm’s Employment Law Practice on benefit plan issues in outsourcing transactions and employment and benefit plan litigation matters

Practice Breadth

We are experienced at designing, negotiating, drafting, implementing and administering executive compensation arrangements and employee benefit plans and arrangements of all types and in all contexts, including:

• CEO and other senior executive employment agreements and benefit arrangements

• "Change in Control" and other severance plans and arrangements

• Bonus and other annual and long-term incentive compensation plans, including plans that qualify as “performance-based” under US tax laws

• Stock option and other equity-based compensation plans, for both public and private companies

• Tax-qualified pension and profit sharing plans and ESOPs

• Nonqualified deferred compensation plans, SERPs and other retirement plans and arrangements

• Health care and other welfare benefit plans and arrangements

• Structuring ERISA-qualified venture capital and real estate operating companies and other investment vehicles

• Structuring benefit plans and maintenance of benefit arrangements in outsourcing transactions