© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook
Kansas City-based Polsinelli has added Patti Hedgpeth as a shareholder and two others to the firm’s Dallas office to bolster its employee benefits practice. Joining Hedgpeth from Crain Cubbage Healy are senior partner Rita Johnson and associate Meredith VanderWilt.
Hedgpeth, who focuses her practice on the implementation and operation of tax-qualified retirement plans, employee stock ownership plans, nonqualified deferred compensation arrangements and health and welfare benefit plans, said she was attracted to Polsinelli’s deep bench of employee benefits professionals.
“This combined expertise will allow us to respond to our clients as timely and efficiently as possible,” she said.
The Texas Tech University School of Law graduate says two hot issues facing her clients are health care reform, specifically how and how well the health care exchanges will work and affect employer-provided coverage, and lifetime income options for 401(k) plan sponsors.
“Many 401(k) plans currently only allow participants to choose a single sum distribution, or perhaps installments over a set number of years,” she said. “But there has been quite a bit of discussion recently about ways to allow participants to choose distribution options that will generate a fixed income stream throughout retirement.”
Additionally, she says the biggest challenge for her clients continues to be “the ability to balance the need to provide a benefits package that will attract employees with the required skill sets with the need to balance the budget.”
Hedgpeth cited her representation of a Fortune 500 company in connection with an audit of its pension plans by the Internal Revenue Service as one of the most memorable cases she has worked on. The case spanned four years, and she was able to help the company respond to more than 100 inquiries by the IRS, many of them involving technical pension rules.
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