Overview
Jeff Smith helps clients develop and implement successful strategies for responding to a broad range of employee benefits and compensation issues, including retirement plans, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and other employment-related benefits. He ensures they comply with federal, state, and local laws and regulations, like the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), among others. He guides them through the design and implementation of benefit plans, including advising on tax implications and other regulatory compliance and reporting of their benefits strategy. And he spends considerable time on executive compensation, multiemployer pension plan advice, and employee benefits issues in mergers and acquisitions.
Jeff’s strengths include counseling clients of all types – for-profit businesses and corporations, non-for-profit entities, private schools, and others – on compensation issues for their top leaders. This involves negotiating and drafting employment and compensation agreements and all types of incentive compensation plans.
In addition, working closely with his labor relations colleagues, Jeff advises employers contributing to multiemployer pension plans on withdrawals and withdrawal liability and helps employers minimize their costs. Finally, he helps buyers and sellers of businesses facilitate employee benefits issues in their transactions. For many merger and acquisition clients, Jeff coordinates the Fisher Phillips team with outside corporate counsel.
Jeff is devoted to helping clients remain competitive in an evolving business market, providing them with the solid foundations they need to meet – and overcome – the challenges they face, from new and novel market entrants to the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence as a business strategy, and everything in between.