I have been catching up on my long backlist of reading and recently read an excellent article on litigation challenging the fees of mutual fund advisers: Quinn Curtis and John Morley, The Flawed Mechanics of Mutual Fund Fee Litigation.

As you may know, section 36(b) of the Investment Company Act of 1940 gives mutual fund investors and the SEC a cause of action to challenge excessive investment adviser fees.
Section 36(b) has generated quite a bit of academic commentary; Curtis and Morley’s footnote listing those articles (fn. 4, if you’re interested) takes up more than a page of single-spaced text. The Supreme Court has also recently chimed in on section 36(b). Jones v. Harris Assocs. L.P., 559 U.S. 335 (2010) discussed the standard for reviewing advisors’ fees under section 36(b).

Don’t worry; Curtis and Morley don’t rehash all of the earlier commentary. Instead, they take the existence of a section 36(b) cause of action as a given and ask how it can be improved to better achieve its purposes. Here’s the abstract:

We identify a number of serious mechanical flaws in the statutes and judicial doctrines that organize fee liability for mutual fund managers. Originating in section 36(b) of the Investment Company Act, this form of liability allows investors to sue managers for charging fees above a judicially created standard. Commentators have extensively debated whether this form of liability should exist, but in this paper we focus instead on improving the mechanics of how it actually works. We identify a number of problems. Among other things, statutes and case law give recoveries to investors who did not actually pay the relevant fees. Statutes and case law also impose no penalties to provide deterrence; they treat similar categories of fees differently; they create an unusual settlement process that prevents litigants from settling their full claims; they expose low-cost advisers to serious litigation risk; they exhibit deep confusion about what makes fees excessive; and they provide unduly small incentives for plaintiffs’ lawyers that are only adequate in cases of low merit. Most of these problems appear to be the unintended results of accidents and confusion, rather than deliberate policy choices. We conclude by offering specific ideas for reform.

The article, to be published in the Yale Journal of Regulation, was posted on SSRN in March, but it’s been sitting in my computer reading file since then. Better late than never. If you’re interested in the regulation of mutual funds and investment advisers, it’s definitely worth reading.