eastern district of wisconsin milwaukee county, employee

upon retirement. 1
It is undisputed that Milwaukee County’s Director of Human Resources,
Gary Dobbert (“Dobbert”), designed the BackDROP with “minimal help” from anyone and
without consulting Mercer on its design. 2
Despite Mercer’s lack of involvement in the design of the BackDROP, the County,
together with its pension fund, the Milwaukee County Employes’ Retirement System (“ERS”), a
separate legal entity, and its governing Pension Board, sued Mercer, their former actuary, years
after the events, for Mercer’s alleged role in the enactment of the BackDROP. The basic theory
of the Plaintiffs’ case is that Mercer somehow should have stopped the County Board of
Supervisors – the decisionmakers in County government – from enacting the benefit that
Dobbert had designed. The Plaintiffs claim that they have suffered more than $100 million in
damages as a result of their “reliance” on Mercer.
Mercer’s motion for summary judgment seeks the dismissal of the Complaint and all of
Plaintiffs’ causes of action on the simple premise that there is no evidence in the record that
anyone on the County Board of Supervisors relied on Mercer’s advice in making the decision to
enact the BackDROP, much less that a majority of Supervisors did so. Indeed, with regard to
each of the specific factual allegations the Plaintiffs have raised supposedly supporting their
claims against Mercer, the evidence in the record demonstrates that no one at the County Board
relied on anything Mercer did or did not do:
• The October 27, 2000 Pension Study Commission Hearing. The centerpiece of
the County’s case against Mercer is its allegation that Mercer should have
“spoken up” at an October 27, 2000 Pension Study Commission (“PSC”) hearing
to tell PSC members that Mercer had not yet performed a cost analysis of the
BackDROP. Disclosing this fact was supposedly necessary because Dobbert had
1 See Mercer’s Proposed Findings of Fact in Support of Its Motion for Summary Judgment (“PFF”) 1-2.
Although the enactment of the BackDROP is the focus of this case, the details of how the benefit works in practice
are not essential for purposes of this motion.
2 PFF, 3. Dobbert pled no contest to one felony and two misdemeanors for his misconduct in connection with the
enactment of the BackDROP. PFF, 4.
QBACTIVE\6280487.1 2
Case 2:06-cv-00372-CNC Filed 06/09/2008 Page 2 of 52 Document 110