On June 13, 2025, Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight received final approval of a record-breaking $69 million settlement on behalf of the UnitedHealth Group 401(k) Savings Plan and its more than 350,000 participants and beneficiaries.

The  lawsuit was filed in April 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. The Complaint alleged that UnitedHealth Group (“UnitedHealth”) violated the fiduciary duty of prudence under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”) by keeping the Wells Fargo Target Fund Suite, one of the worst-performing target date options in the entire market, as the default investment in its 401(k) Plan (“the Plan”).

In August 2022, Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight expanded the claims to include breach of the duty of loyalty and prohibited transactions after uncovering evidence that suggested UnitedHealth may have been using the Plan as a bargaining chip to curry favor with Wells Fargo, one of its major insurance customers.

To justify keeping the poorly performing Wells Fargo Target Fund Suite, UnitedHealth allegedly kept its decision-making secret and disregarded key findings that the Plan’s own Investment Committee and outside consultant had made, while abandoning the Plan’s written criteria for screening investments.

After reviewing this key evidence, the Court substantially denied UnitedHealth’s motion for summary judgment and ordered the case to proceed to trial. The parties settled the case shortly thereafter.

The resolution of this case was a product of an extraordinary effort on the part of Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight's ERISA lawyers. The Settlement came after four years of robust litigation, which included two summary judgment motions, full fact and expert discovery with thousands of documents, twenty depositions, and eight written reports among four experts.