Carrie J.Grove

Partner

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Carrie partners with her clients to ensure that their benefit and pension plans operate smoothly and in compliance with the law.


More About Carrie

Employee benefit plans offer important benefits and security to employees, and help companies attract and retain the best talent. These plans are also subject to a complex and evolving set of laws, which are difficult for plan sponsors to navigate. Clients look to Carrie for assistance in navigating all legal, strategic, and practical aspects of establishing and administering a wide variety of employee benefit plans.

Over two decades of experience as an ERISA attorney has afforded Carrie the opportunity to handle a vast array of complex issues involving all aspects of establishing and managing employee plans. Her practice focuses on self-administered multiemployer pension and benefit plans. Clients appreciate the practical, "real world" approach she takes when dealing with legal as well as non-legal challenges facing the plans.

Multiemployer plan clients seek Carrie's advice on legal matters and ask her to be involved in most aspects of administering their plans. These range from routine matters, which include handling benefit appeals and answering questions from fund office staff on COBRA, QDROs, benefit payments and other straightforward legal compliance issues, to larger, more complex projects such as plan restatements and compliance program submissions to the IRS, handling DOL compliance audits, implementing plan changes due to new collective bargaining directives or changes in the law, including the No Surprises Act and Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and assisting the Trustees in taking the necessary steps to improve the funded status of the plan.

Carrie drafts plan documents, plan amendments, and participant communications. She is also regularly involved with drafting and negotiating agreements with third-party service providers for her multiemployer plan clients. Carrie is responsible for reviewing private equity and other alternative investment agreements and related documentation, and negotiating side letters that contain provisions that afford greater protection to the ERISA plans she represents. She also negotiates investment management agreements for separate accounts and group trusts.

In addition to the benefits work Carrie does for her multiemployer plan clients, she (with the help of her colleagues in the labor and employment, real estate, corporate and tax departments at Seyfarth) also assists her self-administered multiemployer plan clients with issues that any employer would face, including employment issues (leave issues, claims of discrimination, terminations, etc.), labor issues for the clients’ unionized staff, executive compensation for the top management, corporate issues such as by-laws, dba filings, real estate purchases and leases, and computer software contracts. 

The Executive Director of a set of large multiemployer pension and health plans that Carrie represents stated in an email that: 

“My interaction with Carrie Grove is often (weekly and at times daily). Carrie’s sense of urgency regarding all Trust Fund business in unparalleled. I have said many times to those that ask, her ability to get large “quantities” and “quality” work done timely is remarkable and greatly appreciated. Our workload is immense and she never lets me or the Trust Fund down. I wouldn’t want this type of a job without having a quality person like Carrie Grove to work alongside.”

At Seyfarth, Carrie enjoys the warm and friendly atmosphere, where everyone's goal is to provide top-quality legal services.

  • JD, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
  • BS, California State Polytechnic University-Pomona
    Psychology

    Magna cum laude

  • California