Photo of Neil V. Shah

Neil V. Shah

Subscribe to Neil V. Shah's Posts

Neil V. Shah is a member of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Group, where he focuses on ERISA litigation.

He is the lead attorney representing the firm’s Taft-Hartley plan clients in withdrawal liability and delinquent contributions matters.  As part of his practice, Neil pursues employers, their owners and officers, and affiliated companies to collect the amounts owed to these plans using a variety of complex legal theories, and has secured several precedential opinions and multi-million-dollar judgments in their favor.  Neil also defends these plans in arbitrations challenging the methods and assumptions used to calculate withdrawal liability, which has yielded a number of notable arbitration decisions and court opinions.  Owing to his experience in this area, Neil is a co-editor of the withdrawal liability chapter of the premier employee benefits treatise, Employee Benefits Law, published by Bloomberg, and regularly presents on the topic before practitioners and consultants that work in the area, such as at meetings of the Conference of Consulting Actuaries and the Employee Benefits Section of ABA’s Section of Labor & Employment Law.

In addition to his Taft-Hartley plan experience, Neil has represented several plan sponsors and fiduciaries in ERISA class actions alleging that the plan’s investments or other practices are imprudent, such as excessive fee and stock drop cases.

Prior to joining Proskauer, Neil was an associate at a large regional firm, where he litigated individual and class actions involving challenges to insurer claims adjudication procedures under ERISA, fraud recoveries against healthcare providers, and claims for benefits.

Neil has authored several articles, including those published in the New Jersey Law Journal and Bloomberg National Affairs.  He is also a frequent contributor to Proskauer’s Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Blog.

Contact:Read more about Neil V. Shah

Under ERISA, a participating employer that withdraws from a multiemployer pension plan must pay its share of the plan’s unfunded vested benefits (i.e., its withdrawal liability).  ERISA’s “controlled group” rules extend this obligation to all “trades and businesses” that are under “common control” with the withdrawing employer, thereby making the withdrawing employer and each controlled…

In Perfection Bakeries Inc. v. Retail Wholesale & Dep’t Store Int’l Union & Indus. Pension Fund, No. 23-12533, 147 F.4th 1314 (11th Cir. Aug. 1, 2025), the Eleventh Circuit affirmed that an employer’s credit for a prior partial withdrawal from a multiemployer pension plan must be applied at the second step of the four-step statutory…

A multiemployer plan that prevails in an action to collect delinquent contributions or withdrawal liability is statutorily entitled to recover reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs “of the action.”  In International Painters & Allied Trades Industry Pension Fund v. Florida Glass of Tampa Bay, Inc., No. 23-cv-00045, 2025 WL 712965 (D. Md. Mar. 5, 2025)…

A federal district court in Illinois became the first court to rule that an employer’s credit for a prior partial withdrawal should be applied at the end of the statute’s “waterfall” for calculating withdrawal liability.  The case is Consumers Concrete Corp. v. Central States, S.E. and S.W. Areas Pension Fund, Nos. 23-cv-2695 & 23-cv-3005…