PLANSPONSOR — the leading publication for retirement plan sponsors and fiduciaries — covers Darrow's June 2024 webinar on AI's role in ERISA litigation, and provides a rare perspective that includes both plaintiff-side capability and defense-side skepticism. The result is one of the more balanced examinations of what AI-powered legal intelligence actually means for plan sponsors navigating an increasingly aggressive litigation environment.
The webinar, hosted by Darrow, featured Shai Silbermann, a legal data specialist at the company, who explained how AI can be used to identify underperforming funds and excessive fee arrangements in retirement plans far more efficiently than manual review. The core challenge Silbermann described is well-known to the industry: many funds in retirement plans are simply not monitored by fiduciaries, and AI allows plaintiff attorneys to identify those gaps without having to manually process thousands of Form 5500 filings. Darrow's approach combines data from multiple plan years, benchmarks recordkeeping and administrative fees against plans of similar size, and flags administrators whose fees fall outside what courts have historically considered reasonable.
PLANSPONSOR also gives prominent space to David Levine, a principal and ERISA defense attorney at the Groom Law Group, who offers a more measured view. Levine describes AI in ERISA litigation as "evolutionary, not revolutionary" — a tool that makes existing analytical work faster rather than fundamentally changing the legal landscape. He also pushes back directly on one of Darrow's benchmarking claims: the company's blog had cited $25–$35 per participant as a reasonable range for plan administration fees, a figure Levine challenged directly, noting that nothing in ERISA establishes that range as the standard.
That tension — between a plaintiff-side platform arguing AI enables the identification of violations at unprecedented scale, and a defense attorney cautioning against overreliance on AI-generated benchmarks — is what makes this piece particularly valuable for plan sponsors. The article is not simply a showcase for Darrow's capabilities; it places those capabilities in the context of how fiduciaries and their counsel will need to respond as the ERISA litigation landscape continues to evolve.
At the time of publication, Darrow was being used by more than 300 attorneys and had been associated with more than $10 billion in claimed damages across its partner firms' active litigation.
