Robert C. "Bob" Schmidt

Robert “Bob” Schmidt joined Adams and Reese in 1997 and has worked consistently in the employee benefits and ERISA arena. He has served as an attorney-adviser with the U.S. Tax Court in Washington, DC, and has extensive experience with pension and other employee benefit plans, drafting more than 2,500 plans.

Providing technical support to the firm's ERISA litigation team, Bob also advises the transactional lawyers who handle mergers or acquisitions involving employee benefits.

His significant contributions include:

• Solving plan qualification and other benefits problems. He has designed, drafted or reviewed almost every type of employee benefit plan. His experience encompasses benefit plans of publicly traded and privately held companies as well as 403(b) and 457 plans and other types of governmental plans.
• Regularly advising employers and fiduciaries on issues pertaining to plan adoption, maintenance, transactions, investment policies, administration and termination.
• Experience in obtaining favorable determination letters for client plans from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and in using procedures issued by the IRS to make voluntary correction of plan compliance failures. He has created a set of IRS-approved prototype plans for use by Adams and Reese clients.
• Working with plan sponsors and fiduciaries with regard to the implementation, design, funding, conversion, termination and operation of numerous employee stock ownership plans, including the correction of errors and solution of other problems of such plans.

Bob has been listed in every edition of Best Lawyers® - Employee Benefits Law, since 1984. He has a Masters of Law in Taxation and is board certified as a tax law specialist by the Louisiana Board of Legal Specialization.

In his free time, Bob enjoys tennis and civic work.