MADISON, Wis.— A Wisconsin federal judge has granted preliminary approval to a class settlement in the long-running ERISA lawsuit against the Credit Union Retirement Plan Association (CURPA), reviving a deal that had previously been rejected and allowing the case to move toward a final fairness hearing later this summer.
In a March 30 Opinion and Order, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson certified a class and four subclasses tied to participants in the CURPA 401(k) plan (which serves employees at more than 100 CUs) as adopted by FirstLight Federal Credit Union and California Coast Credit Union, and also preliminarily approved the proposed settlement.
The lawsuit was filed in April 2022 by former plan participants Brenda L. Lucero, Heather Barton, Ilona Kompaniiets and Cynthia Hurtado, who alleged that entities involved in administering CURPA’s multiple-employer 401(k) plan failed to control recordkeeping costs and breached fiduciary duties under ERISA.
The case had already survived an early dismissal effort, with Peterson previously allowing the excessive-fee claims to proceed, but it later narrowed substantially after the court denied class certification in 2024 and found only one named plaintiff had standing to continue pressing claims.
Peterson had twice refused to bless earlier settlement efforts, including a proposed $570,000 deal that Bloomberg Law reported the court found insufficiently supported and inequitable in how it treated participants from different adopting employers. In the new order, however, the judge said the parties addressed his remaining concerns by creating subclasses for participants with balances before and after recordkeeping fees were lowered in 2021, estimating post-2021 damages and revising the allocation formula to reflect the reduced fees after that point.
The court appointed Capozzi Adler, P.C. as class counsel and RG/2 Claims Administration LLC as settlement administrator, set April 27 as the deadline to issue class notice and comply with federal notice requirements, and ordered that class members be given 45 days to object. The parties must move for final approval and for fees and costs by July 13, and the court has scheduled a fairness hearing for Aug. 28 in Madison.