AME Church Employee Retirement Fund
This MDL, centralized in the Western District of Tennessee in 2022, consolidates claims brought by clergy and other employees of the African Methodist Episcopal Church alleging that the Church, its senior officials, and third-party companies retained to administer the Church's employee retirement plan were negligent and breached fiduciary duties, resulting in substantial losses to the plan discovered in 2021. Plaintiffs assert claims under state law and, in the alternative, under the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, against the denomination, individual officials, and plan-administration defendants.
What has driven resolution in this docket so far is a defendant-by-defendant settlement process rather than a single global resolution: one plan-administration defendant has already reached a settlement addressing a substantial portion of the alleged losses, establishing both a partial recovery for plan participants and a developed factual record on how the losses arose that bears on the remaining claims. With 6 actions still pending, the litigation now centers on the remaining defendants, including the Church and its officials, and on how fiduciary-duty standards apply to a non-ERISA or ERISA-alternative church retirement plan, a legal question with its own doctrinal nuances given religious-organization plan structures.
For anyone assessing duration and resolution paths in fiduciary-breach and plan-mismanagement litigation, this docket illustrates how a staged, defendant-by-defendant settlement process can meaningfully de-risk and inform the remaining claims even before a docket fully resolves. Criterica Intelligence's platform tracks this kind of sequential-resolution structure, distinguishing a docket with an established partial-settlement baseline from one where liability remains entirely open, across every active MDL.
That the Church, its senior officials, and third-party companies administering its employee retirement plan were negligent and breached fiduciary duties, causing substantial losses to plan participants that were discovered in 2021.
Plaintiffs plead claims under state law and, in the alternative, under the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, reflecting genuine legal uncertainty over how a church-sponsored retirement plan is classified and which fiduciary-duty framework governs it.
It resolved a substantial share of the alleged losses for one defendant and produced a developed factual record on how the losses arose, which now informs the claims still pending against the Church and its officials.
That resolution can proceed defendant by defendant rather than through a single global settlement, with an early settlement against one party meaningfully shaping the factual and damages framework for the claims that remain, a sequencing pattern Criterica Intelligence tracks across comparable dockets.
Statistics shown reflect historical or illustrative model outputs derived from real case data. They are not predictions or guarantees of any individual outcome. Litigation results depend on facts, jurisdiction, judge, and counsel, and vary case by case. Model accuracy is subject to selection effects and changing legal dynamics.