Elizabeth Hopkins

Biography

Elizabeth Hopkins is Of Counsel at Berger Montague, where she concentrates her practice on ERISA and employee benefits litigation. One of the nation’s foremost ERISA appellate advocates, Ms. Hopkins has practiced in the field for more than three decades, litigating pension class actions across the country, mental health parity class actions, and individual pension, healthcare, disability, and life insurance cases on behalf of employees and their families who have been denied benefits under ERISA plans. In 2024, she was appointed a member of the Advisory Council on Employee Welfare and Pension Benefit Plans (the ERISA Advisory Council), the 15-member body that advises the Secretary of Labor on the Secretary’s functions under ERISA.

Before entering private practice, Ms. Hopkins spent nearly three decades in the United States Department of Labor’s Office of the Solicitor. As Counsel for Appellate and Special Litigation in the Plan Benefits Security Division from 2002 to 2017, she headed the Department’s ERISA amicus and appellate program, overseeing nationwide litigation on employee benefit issues. In that role, she filed well over 100 friend-of-the-court and party briefs, argued in federal courts of appeals throughout the country, and helped formulate the Department’s positions in many of the most significant ERISA cases before the United States Supreme Court over the last two decades, working closely with the Solicitor General’s office and other federal agencies. She was among the first recipients of the Solicitor’s annual award for outstanding brief writing.

Ms. Hopkins subsequently served as a senior partner at a boutique law firm, where she built and led the firm’s pension practice, litigating class and representative pension actions nationwide involving fiduciary breaches and the management of hundreds of millions of dollars in plan assets, and overseeing the firm’s amicus and Supreme Court ERISA practice. Currently, she is the principal of Hopkins ERISA Law, litigating pension class actions across the country and advising on healthcare matters. Her amicus advocacy has been cited at oral argument in the Supreme Court, including in Thole v. U.S. Bank, N.A. and Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.

A Fellow and Board Member of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel, Ms. Hopkins also serves as a Senior Editor of the American Bar Association’s seminal treatise, Employee Benefits Law, and as a Board Member of Bender’s Labor and Employment Bulletin, to which she contributes articles quarterly. She co-edited Your ERISA Watch, one of the nation’s most popular ERISA legal blogs, regularly writes on ERISA topics for Law360 and other publications, and is a frequent speaker and teacher at ERISA conferences and bar-sponsored events. Ms. Hopkins earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and her B.A. in English, with high distinction, from the University of Arizona, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Outside her practice, she teaches online classes on rhetoric to young women and girls in Afghanistan through Classroom Without Walls and volunteers with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s youth and family programming.