California courts are the most favorable to retirement plan participants and investors in ERISA lawsuits, says Brooks Magratten, editor of a recently updated American Bar Association book that looks at judicial treatment of pension law throughout America.

“Courts around the country can take very different approaches to ERISA cases,” said Magratten, a Rhode Island attorney who has been representing banks and insurance companies as defendants in Employee Retirement Income Security Act litigation for three decades.

While California federal courts tend to be more liberal in granting wins to plan participants and investors in suits, their counterparts in New England are more protective of plan fiduciaries and custodians by adhering more strictly to the letter of the law.

As an example, the attorney said, ERISA allows participants to recoup lawyer fees if they win.

California federal courts routinely grant large fee requests, while in New England the attorney fees are rarely awarded and stingier when they are.

With this knowledge, lawyers representing plan participants for large companies can go court shopping to bring the lawsuits where they have the greatest chances of success.

But Magratten said he knows of one company that successfully required that a lawsuit could only be brought in a specific federal court that usually favored plan administrators and vendors.

Even though ERISA is a federal law, Magratten said suits can be filed in state courts on contests over plan benefits.

However, he said when an ERISA case comes up in a state court, banks, insurers and other defendants will usually demand the suit be transferred to a federal court because federal judges tend to be better acquainted with ERISA than state court judges and the cases tend to proceed faster at the federal level.