Weyerhaeuser Co.

The Palmason v. Weyerhaeuser Co. ERISA litigation is currently pending in the United States District Court Western District of Washington. The Complaint was filed on behalf of Plaintiff and a proposed class of all participants of the Weyerhaeuser Retirement Plan for Salaried Employees (“Salaried Plan”) and the Weyerhaeuser Retirement Plan for Hourly Employees (“Hourly Plan”) (together the “Plans”) who are vested in accrued benefits in the Plans from January 1, 2006 to the present and their beneficiaries.

The Complaint alleges that Defendants breached their fiduciary duties owed to Plan participants by causing or permitting the Plans’ Master Trust to invest more than 81% of its assets in alternative investments (including 53% in hedge funds and 24% in private equity), an inherently risky, illiquid and unusual asset allocation. Compounding this misguided allocation of assets, as alleged in the Complaint, Defendants magnified the portfolio’s risk with the purchase of derivatives, substantially overshooting their own target for the portfolio’s risk. The Complaint further alleges that Defendants knew or should have known that their unique strategy exposed the portfolio to undue risk while conferring no benefit on plan participants in these overfunded pension plans. Additionally, the Complaint alleges that Defendants breached their fiduciary duties by investing in a stunningly large number of alternative investments (approximately 330 different hedge funds, private equity investments, and real estate funds) making it nearly impossible to manage the port-folio’s risk and further breached their fiduciary duties by failing to perform adequate due diligence to ensure that the portfolio presented no more risk than the targeted benchmark.

The Complaint concludes that the Plans’ inappropriately risky and poorly executed investment strategy caused Weyerhaeuser’s pension plan assets (including the Plans’ Master Trust) to fall from being overfunded by $2.1 billion at the end of 2007 to being underfunded by $450 million just one year later, thereby jeopardizing the retirement benefits of the Plans’ participants and beneficiaries.

If you are a member of the Weyerhaeuser Retirement Plan for Salaried Employees or the Weyerhaeuser Retirement Plan for Hourly Employees, please contact us for more information regarding the Weyerhaeuser ERISA Litigation.

Not all claims are against every Defendant.