Health Law Labor Services

Labor and Employment Law Practice

Vedder Price has had an extensive labor and employment law practice, earning a reputation as one of the nation’s premier employment law firms. It represents private and public sector employers in virtually every aspect of arbitration and other union-management issues, discrimination law, affirmative action, wage-hour issues, and occupational safety and health.

Within its employment law practice it has developed a special niche representing health care clients. From the largest health care system in the country to individual physician groups, its labor and employment clients represent the full spectrum of health care providers. We know that health care industry clients have special employment needs and face unique problems. First, health care is a labor-intensive industry employing persons having vastly different skills, training, compensation and interests. Second, health care managers are often scientists, physicians or technicians having relatively little training in employee relations. Third, because of increased demands to reduce health care costs, health care providers see employee loyalty eroding and employees becoming vulnerable to union promises of job security and wage increases. At the same time, hospitals and other providers are viewed as deep pockets by litigious disgruntled former and current employees who believe they have been wrongly treated and, with increasing frequency, file claims and lawsuits under the many statutory and common law bases available to them. 

We understand these special concerns, having counseled and represented health care clients in employment matters for many years. This experience gives us the ability to understand our clients’ perspectives, anticipate certain problems before they occur, and provide legal support that is focused, practical and effective.  

Employee Benefits

Vedder Price has one of the nation’s largest and most sophisticated employee benefits practices. Our benefits attorneys are familiar with the technical, legal and practical problems arising in connection with every type of employee benefit plan. Their experience includes ongoing responsibility for the design, administration and legal compliance of pension, profit sharing and welfare benefit plans for our health care clients. We regularly advise employers with respect to insured group health plans, self-funded group health plans or a combination of both, and a variety of other welfare plans, including compliance with the complex nondiscrimination rules applicable to welfare plans.

In particular, our attorneys advise clients in the health care industry with regard to several areas of executive compensation and employee benefits. On the executive compensation side, new and creative approaches are required to provide executives with an appropriate level of total compensation. On the general employee benefit side, health care institutions are often involved with types of benefit plans (Section 457 and Section 403(b)) that have unique requirements and concerns. 

An integral part of the employee benefits practice involves representing clients and their plans before the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and obtaining determinations from these regulatory agencies on the qualified status of the plans and the many interpretative questions that inevitably arise in the course of plan administration.

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