James M. Nelson

James M. Nelson, a litigator honored for his contributions to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA” ) area of the labor and employment bar, passed away in 2023 at age 66. He was a Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel (the “College”), having been inducted in 2009.

Majoring in political science, Jim earned his B.A. from the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1979 and his law degree from the University of Arizona College of Law (in 1999 renamed the James E. Rogers College of Law) also in Tucson in 1982, where he co-founded and served as Comment and Note Editor on the Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law.

Jim began his career as an attorney in Phoenix, AZ at Shimmel, Hill, Bishop and Gruender, P.C. (1982-1987). He moved on to Sacramento, CA as partner at Diepenbrock, Wulff, Plant & Hannegan, LLP (later closed) (1989-1998), Downey Brand Seymour & Rohwer LLP (later, Downey Brand LLP) (1999-2002), and Seyfarth Shaw LLP (2002-2008).

He joined Greenburg Traurig, LLP’s Sacramento office in 2009, where he co-chaired the firm’s national ERISA and Employee Benefits Litigation Group and served as Chair of the firm's Sacramento office’s Labor and Employment Practice. Clients consulted him for employee benefits counseling, litigation risk reduction strategies, complex employee benefits litigation and appeals, and his expertise in the treatment of independent contractors as employees.

Jim is credited on the briefs for Concrete Pipe & Products of California, Inc. v. Construction Laborers Pension Trust for So. Cal., 508 U.S. 602 (1993), which helped to clarify withdrawal liability in pension plans.

He was named a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers in 2010. He was also elected as a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Active at both the regional and national levels, Jim was a member of the College Board of Governors (2012-2018), including service as Assistant Secretary (2014-2016) and as a member of the College’s website/listserve committee. He co-chaired the Health and Welfare Benefits Subcommittee of the American Bar Association Labor and Employment Section’s Employee Benefits Committee and was a long-time co-editor of the Employee Benefits Committee Newsletter. From 1988-2010, he participated on the Planning Committee of the Tulane University Law School Multistate Labor and Employment Law Seminar.

In the true spirit of service as a Fellow of the College, Jim also mentored students to “pay it forward” as an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School in 2011, teaching the Survey of Welfare Benefits Plan Issues in the LL.M. Employee Benefits Program. With a smile in her voice as she thought of Jim, College Fellow and Professor Katie Kennedy (later at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law) said that Jim’s law students loved him, especially for his remote teaching while aboard his sailing ship. He closed emails to them with “Fair winds!”

College Fellow Doug Selwyn (and co-editor with Jim of the Employee Benefits Committee Newsletter) recalled that Jim often authored articles in which he opened with humorous musings from federal rules, regulations, and case law to life itself, especially from the helm of his sailboat. In Jim’s article in the December 2019 Employee Benefits Committee Newsletter,* he compared employee benefits law and sailing “The Pacific Puddle Jump,” a journey of some 3,400 miles. Somewhere past Hawaii at the outer range of weather feed, Jim posited: “If this were a 13th Century paper map, the cartographer would have drawn dragons and sea serpents into the white space signifying the unknown. If this were the late 1980s[,] a cite to the original Section 89 proposed regulations [controversial Internal Revenue Code nondiscrimination rules relating to employee benefit plans that were later repealed] may have appeared here.”

Continuing, he said that “Passage navigation, like defined benefit plan actuarial work, is less about hitting a precise target than it is about not being off target in the wrong direction …. So, like the actuary, one wants to pick up the Trade Winds somewhere well west of the Marquesas and it would be bad to be pushed east toward or past them.”

A prolific writer, Jim shared his knowledge in articles throughout his career on a wide range of ERISA topics. His writing included the 1991 looseleaf, “Health and Welfare Benefit Plans: Legal Guide to Planning and Management," (Butterworth Legal Publishers).

Jim was active in his community, including his 10 years of service as a Board member of the Greater Sacramento Chapter of the ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] Association. Perhaps the best measure of Jim was his active interest in and equal treatment of every person he met, no matter what rank or station.

*available at
https://web.archive.org/web/20210418185456/https://www.americanbar.org/groups/labor_law/publications/ebc_news_archive/holiday-2019-issue/pushing-relates-to/

Photo Source: The Decade Book, American College of Employee Benefits Counsel 2000-2010