In this episode of Legally Bond, Kim speaks with Bond attorney John Godsoe. John discusses the nuances of his employee benefits and executive compensation practice.
In this episode of Legally Bond, Kim speaks with Bond attorney John Godsoe. John discusses the nuances of his employee benefits and executive compensation practice.
Hello and welcome to Legally Bond, a podcast presented by the law firm Bond Chenneken Gang. I'm your host, kim Wulf Price. On today's episode we're speaking with John Gonzo, a member of the firm who practices out of Bond's Buffalo office. John leads the employee benefits and executive compensation practice group, which is part of Bond's business department. Hey, john, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Kim, how are you? I'm doing all right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, thanks for coming on. I'm glad to have the chance to have you as a guest. Well, so, if it's okay with you, I'd like to focus today on your practice group employee benefits and executive compensation. It's an interesting practice group and one that, while it touches the lives of most employed individuals, is something I don't think many people know much about. So is that an okay topic for today?
Speaker 2:That sounds like a plan.
Speaker 1:All right, great, all right. So on Legally Bond, I typically start each episode asking the guests to tell us a little bit about themselves. So if you'd want to tell us a little bit about yourself undergrad, where you grew up, family any of that would be great.
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely so. I am a New York native. I live in Buffalo now, but I grew up in a small town called Pauling, new York, which is about 60 miles north of New York City. Typical small town. Everyone knows each other. My dad was a fourth grade teacher, seems like everywhere we walked, either he had a new kid there or a parent had taken him years ago. So it was that type of upbringing. You know, if you live down there 60 miles north of the city, you call yourself upstate New York. Most other places Syracuse and Buffalo would consider it downstate, but there's certainly that division in New York, depending on your geography. So that's where I grew up.
Speaker 2:I went to college in the South at a school called Wake Forest University in North Carolina. I was looking to get a little bit of warmer weather at that time and I was a sports fan and wake checked a couple boxes of being a small liberal arts college. I was a history major. That intrigued me, but it's also part of the ACC, so I got to see big time basketball and football. I was lucky enough to be there when a guy named Tim Duncan if there's any basketball fans out there was also there. So Tim went on to go to the NBA and have a great career when multiple championships with the Spurs, et cetera, so it was a great place to be in. A good college experience Took a few years off before eventually landing at law school in Buffalo. So that's my trajectory from an educational standpoint and I've been here in Buffalo for about 15 years or so practicing employee benefits.
Speaker 1:That's great. So Putnam County is that where it's actually Dutchess County, so just north.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Putnam's a little sliver north of Westchester than Dutchess is after that.
Speaker 1:So Okay, I think you are officially upstate, then. Even I think that All right. Well, so you took a bit of time off. You ended up in Buffalo, but when you started with bond, you didn't start in our Buffalo office, did you?
Speaker 2:No, that's true, and I guess just to fill in the time off they take a couple years off because I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to be an attorney. I think many attorneys faced that as well. It was kind of an interesting time. More, I had a few different jobs, one of which was teaching an SAT prep course for Princeton Review. Oh yeah, there was going out on an archeological dig in the hills of North Carolina. I guess maybe I fancy myself as an amateur Indiana Jones at the time, but one of the most interesting experiences I've ever had. So got those life experiences knew I wanted to go to school. Yeah, ended up at UB Law School, and my initial years, though, were spent in Bond's Syracuse office, so I was there for about five years. My wife has a family here in Buffalo, and once we had our first child we moved out here to Buffalo back in 2006 or so. So that's kind of my complete history from geography perspective.
Speaker 1:Very good, and you've been in a couple of Bond's offices, the two biggest.
Speaker 2:The two biggest. Yes, it's always I mean so. When I started in 2000, the firm was still big but it felt manageable as far as kind of knowing everyone who were in the various offices. Now we have many more offices, many more people. I still try to get to know everybody. We do have this model of one firm and we try our best to get to know everyone in the firm. That becomes a little harder every year as we get a little bit bigger, but I do try my best at events that we have to introduce myself and get to know the rest of the Bond team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great and you're right, it is a little more difficult, but I do think people really make an effort to make sure they get to know everybody.
Speaker 2:Agreed.
Speaker 1:All right, well, thank you. I think listeners appreciate learning a bit about our guests. It's funny that you all moved to Buffalo and we did the New York City to hear at the same time, because our child was about a year old and we made the move, so that's closer to family. So I think it's a, it's a trend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, absolutely. I think family dictates a lot of people's geography decisions. And now it's a little bit different, with a lot of remote work opportunities, so we certainly live in a different world than it was 23 years ago.
Speaker 1:Exactly Then, when the original Indiana Jones movie came out.
Speaker 2:That's true too.
Speaker 1:All right. So you're at UB law and you're going through all those required one out classes, whatever evidence towards whatever it might be. Was there something that started in one of those subjects or another, that sort of started your interest in employee benefits type work?
Speaker 2:Yes and no, it's funny. One funny story is so UB does have an Orissa class, which I signed up for it, and surprisingly it got canceled due to lack of interest.
Speaker 2:So that was my in the world of Orissa, so I never actually got to take an Orissa class in law school but I did take various classes, like like tax, that do impact my current practice and I had a really great tax professor by the name of Ken Joyce. He enjoyed his class, enjoyed some of the tax aspects of practicing law, so I knew I had that in the back of my head. It was just interesting. A lot of people think about policy and think of classes like constitutional law or maybe environmental law, about kind of shaping the world around us. But but tax does as well. I mean tax policy dictates a lot if you think of just you know, inside of like green energy, for example, but on the benefit side too, about promoting retirement savings, looking at tax breaks for adoptions, for example, so that there's a lot of policies that get facilitated through tax policy that you don't really think about.
Speaker 2:I mean that translated. I thought that was interesting and then translated into my interest in tax and then when I summer that bond in 1999, I guess it was I got to know some of the people in the employee benefits group and it was just really a great fit personality wise. A great fit with the group was a smaller group within a bigger firm, a lot of great practitioners, and that really piqued my interest. And since 99, this is all I've really done, so I've been an employee benefits attorney since then.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool. I think that Alesseth met the 15 new associates joining us in a few weeks. Should pay attention to and consider Arissa as a potential practice group right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's funny. I'm on the UB Law Alumni Association and we had an event or there was a welcome event for the new UB students for this year about a week ago. You meet the students and talk about what you do. Not surprisingly, when I told people what I did, they smile and nod and there wasn't a single one who said you know what? That's exactly what I came to law school to do as well. That did not happen, but I got to explain what it was and I think when you come to law school you don't have an understanding the breadth of different areas that a law degree can get you into and to the extent that enlighten them on certain aspects that aren't just litigation or M&A. I think it's helpful because folks come into law school and they think they have a sense of what they might want to do, but that evolves both during law school and when you practice as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Okay. So then I guess that goes to this question. When they asked, how did you describe your work to the students?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is difficult. I try to choose my words carefully to not you know kind of drone on, but I think big picture. I start by saying I represent employers or companies. It's part of a business law or corporate law. It's a subset of that. It's a niche practice and I usually start with the big aspects of our practice, which is usually retirement plans or medical plans. People are familiar with those and if they want to learn more then I'll get more into the details of the different areas of practice. But that's how I'll describe it as a subset of a business law where primarily we're dealing with retirement plans and health plans and helping employers remain compliant, because there's a vast regulatory scheme that underlies all these arrangements that people most folks just aren't familiar with.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and it is a lot more. I mean, obviously those are important to people, right Retirement plans and health plans, but there is a lot more to employee benefits practice.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It touches on so many different areas, whether it's different fringe benefits like educational benefits I've talked before about adoption assistance benefits, transportation policies all types of different things get wrapped into the employee benefits umbrella for sure. And you also talk about a whole another subset being the executive compensation side of things, where you're dealing with the president, ceos, leaders of organizations and their compensation structure. That can get complicated. And then when you get into, I guess, the big two, as I mentioned, the medical plans and the retirement plans, there's so many subsets of areas that you need to know whether it's on the health side, affordable care act, cobra, hipaa. On the retirement side, dealing with fiduciary responsibilities that go along with retirement plans, different type of retirement plans like ESOPs to find benefit plans. That can go on and on. So there are a lot of different subcategories within the umbrella of employee benefits.
Speaker 1:So it must. I would guess that every time a family or friend starts a new position, they immediately call you and say okay for tax benefits. What should I?
Speaker 2:Right Now it is interesting. I've gotten more than one open enrollment information saying okay, can you help me walk through this and what this exactly means? Or is this typical, this matching contribution on my 401k plan? Because these are important aspects with any employer-employee relationship that people don't think about usually initially, but once they go into Louise a little bit and looking at what their actual arrangements are, they become more important to folks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I didn't mean to sort of like downplay that those retirement plans, medical, dental, all that stuff. It's critical to a workplace, it's recruitment and retention and morale, from an employer standpoint as well. So these are complicated decisions for employers too, aren't they?
Speaker 2:Well, absolutely. I mean there's a couple components of it. Typically in our practice it's both the compliance side making sure that employers stay compliant with all the rules and regulations that apply to all these various arrangements and then there's the planning and design and strategy side. As far as okay, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to attract new employees? What's typical in your industry? And that depends on the employer right. So a lot of times we have a lot of higher education institutions.
Speaker 2:Their benefit offerings differ quite vastly, typically, than maybe someone in industry, which might differ from someone in the service area. So there's all different employers. There's no one size fits all. But you know, part of our goal is to understand what our client's goals are, what they're thinking, at the end of the day, they want to provide to their employees, and then we try to strategize to get them to meet their goals. As far as what benefits are being offered, can these be offered in a cost structure that makes sense? And then we can move into the compliance side and say, okay, here's kind of some options, given some restraints, that might apply with respect to a particular strategy that the employer might be thinking about.
Speaker 1:So that client counseling side for you and advising them as they consider changes and to meet their goals, that's got to be very interesting to try to work that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is interesting and, as I mentioned, we were lucky enough to work with a broad range of employers at all that have these different goals and different thoughts, so it's helping them reach their. What they're thinking about is the optimal benefit package that they want to offer their employees, and it's really that's the fun part, I think that to help them construct what they want to offer to the employees as an attraction tool and for retention tool as well.
Speaker 1:It also seems to me that your practice group, the employee benefits and executive conversation, must work a lot with other practice groups within the firm, because you do some of the texts but there's other texts, implications, maybe labor, employment implications. So that cross department must having a big firm must be helpful when you're advising clients.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, I think it's almost daily that I rely on someone from another practice group and bombs likely to have that broad depth that to assist. For example, we're just looking at service contracts for a medical plan arrangement Seems like. These days 50% of any service contract deals with data privacy. So we lean on our data privacy folks If there's an unfortunate situation where we get into litigation. We have a great group of Orisa litigators so we we assist them with litigation matters and they assist us. We work hand in hand with our labor employment group all the time. We're both dealing often with HR folks at our clients and sometimes, particularly in a termination context, there are both employment law considerations as well as benefit considerations that need to be addressed and talked about. So we commonly work with our labor employment partners. Higher education like I said, we do a lot of higher education work.
Speaker 2:We work hand in hand with our large higher education practice group, so I'm constantly collaborating and working with other members at the firm to help our clients in the best way that we can.
Speaker 1:I really like that because it shows how, whatever you learn in law school like, you have to pay attention in all those classes, right, because you're like that's not me, that's going to be this person, but you have to have a sense of that right, and everyone's practices as well.
Speaker 2:Right, it's that. It's that issue, spotting to know when something may be, and that's a way I mean again I talked about the one firm approach and we always look at it and certainly I always look at it as all right. What's the best way to help the client in this case and in so we can consult the particular problem most efficiently. And that might require multiple members of a team and understanding when you need to pull that team member in and getting their help, because, and if you're able to identify those situations, that team, I think, can provide services to the client much better than a single individual can.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and so in employee benefits, that sort of administrative law piece you must deal with a number of really complex regulatory structures Is part of your practice keeping up with the federal and state changes that impact those areas.
Speaker 2:It certainly is. You do have to be a little bit of a glutton for punishment in this area, be willing to dig into the regulations when they get issued and they're usually not four or five pages, they're usually 50 or 60 pages of eight-point font and digging through that. But that's what we signed up for. Maybe that's why no one signed up for that, or is the class 20 years ago at UB, but it's what we do, it's what we enjoy, and part of it is the constant evolving nature of the benefits world and the changes that come through either through regulatory or legislative action. It makes the practice interesting.
Speaker 2:I was just thinking the other day there was a big piece of legislation that was passed at the end of last year called the Secure Act 2.0, which made a number of changes to retirement plans. One change was supposed to be implemented that a lot of employers were working on for 2024. It deals with catch-up contributions, which are these certain type of contributions that you can make under 401k plan. Talking to the client in the afternoon about implementing that change I check the updates. It got delayed just that afternoon that you don't have to implement in 2024. So I'm talking to them at noon saying, okay, here's the plan. Then I'm talking to them at four o'clock saying, okay, plans changed. Maybe we don't have to do this right now. Right now there's this transition period that we're being allowed, so there are constant changes that we have to deal with, whether it's something like that or just a new regulatory requirement that comes out. That makes the job interesting and keeps us on our toes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think when people think about law practice, maybe if they're not in the industry, they don't realize that that's actually what we all like about it is that it does change, it's not static. The skillset you build is useful to help you navigate all of those changes for your clients, but it's not the same day in and day out.
Speaker 2:Right. You need that background, you need that foundation, and that's why we work so hard to get that foundation and be able to pivot and adjust as something gets tweaked. And that happens often in connection with changing administration, where if you have a Democratic administration versus Republican administration, you're on a little bit of a seesaw. We've seen that with some clients, for example, in different rules related to ESG. With regard to ESG investments, certainly under the Obama administration there was a different approach than the Trump administration and now we're shifting back to the Biden administration. So we're always adjusting, we're always trying to figure out how clients can say, in compliance with the change in political winds That'd be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, helping them navigate all of that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So we both mentioned executive compensation, but we didn't really explain what that means. What can that mean, that part of your practice?
Speaker 2:It can mean a lot of things. One thing to keep in mind as a background so the structure of your kind of day-to-day employee benefit programs, whether it's retirement plans or medical plans. On the tax side, there are rules that really restrict what you can do with regard to what's typically called, within code speak, a highly compensated employee or highly compensated individual, and that's usually your executives of your organization. There's limits on the tax favorite benefits that you can provide to those folks, so you have to look to other avenues and arrangements that may be able to provide them with the benefits that you'd like to have to attract and retain great talent. So that's something that we do often. It's been almost 20 years now, but there were changes in the deferred compensation rules under code session call 409A. That had a great impact on executive compensation, employment agreements, retention agreements, anything where we're talking about someone earning something now and being paid out at a later year. There's a lot of complicated requirements that go along with those rules.
Speaker 2:We help clients with those rules on a regular basis and that can keep you on your toes. For example, we deal with a lot of again higher education institutions. If they're hiring a new president, that's usually done. Quick decisions are made, trying to get an agreement in front of them that's agreeable to both sides. So those can be interesting situations. At any time an employer is bringing on a new CEO, obviously it's an important decision, usually talking about high compensation values here, so there's a lot of skin in the game for both sides. So trying to get that right is something that we certainly help clients with and deal with on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was thinking the higher education side. It could be the added twists. There could be everything from a house that built like this is the president's house and housing to tuition, like, without waiting, the three years of full-time employment that other people like. Those must all be conversations that probably come into play.
Speaker 2:Those are and, as I mentioned, everything's unique. It's that side of it. The higher education folks or their benefit package is a little like a lot different than the CEO of a manufacturing facility. That's what keeps it interesting and keeps us on our toes. But a lot of the same rules apply. I mean, it's some of the same principles, so we are able to navigate those waters, wherever it may be, whether it's a nonprofit, for-profit, in the particular situation that the client might be in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the tax code still is there, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:The tax code is still there. It's always there, for sure.
Speaker 1:Always there, it's a constant. Well, as we wrap up, do you have any advice for a new lawyer or a law student maybe interested in this kind of work, where they can do client counseling, a little bit of tax regulatory no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as I mentioned, I was at this UB event the other day, so I was giving this type of advice the other night, like you know. One thing I mentioned is hey, if you don't ever want to set foot in a courtroom, you don't have to. In this practice area there's, you're not we typically although some people are illiterate and in our group we don't do that so you don't have to be someone who's a litigator to get in this group. It's a niche practice. You're normally dealing with a small group of folks at a firm. So if you enjoy that which I do we work closely with our employee benefits group here. Again, we lean on others in other departments, but we're as a core group. We have a small group of dedicated folks here who practice ERISA. So that's a nice feature and it keeps you on your toes. As I mentioned, there's changing regulatory requirements, legislation, always something new and questions coming in for clients, so I think it keeps us busy and interested in the work.
Speaker 1:That's great, and Jim Rooney did not ask me to ask this question. But what if someone is considering a move to the Buffalo area? Do you have any?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, there's Josh Allen in the bill, so we're hopeful for our Super Bowl run. So if you're a football fan, please come to Buffalo. If you like chicken wings, please come to Buffalo. No, Buffalo is a great place. As I mentioned, I didn't grow up here. My wife grew up here, but it's a great city a lot of culture, a lot of history. There's a new art museum here that just went on a multiple year renovation called AKG?
Speaker 1:Is the Albright reopened?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Albright Knox reopened. Now it's called the AKG, so that's generating a lot of buzz. So, yeah, it's a great city, good practitioners, good place to live, short commutes. So I enjoy it here. Don't let that 10 minute clip from CNN about a blizzard that you'll see dissuade you from potentially thinking about visiting or practicing in Buffalo.
Speaker 1:I think that's excellent advice. Thank you so much. Well, thanks, don, for taking the time to be on the podcast today. It's always good to catch up with you, so thanks for joining us. As changes develop in employee benefits or executive compensation, will you come back and do a special episode for us?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Enjoy the conversation, Ken.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks so much. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Legally Bond. If you're listening and have any questions for me, want to hear from someone at the firm or have a suggestion for a future topic, please email us at legallybondbskcom. Also, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to Legally Bond wherever podcasts are downloaded. Until our next talk, be well.
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