Written by David Hall From Hall Benefits Law on June 17, 2025
Click here to watch the video.
Episode Summary:
In this episode of In-House Counsel and HR Perspectives, host David Hall sits down with Jeremy Kilburn and Sara Towne to explore how legal and HR collaboration plays a critical role in strengthening fiduciary oversight and managing benefit plan compliance. They share their unique career paths, the impact of a major merger, and how their team proactively partners across departments to reduce risk, enhance vendor negotiations, and ensure long-term strategic success. Whether you’re in-house counsel, HR leadership, or working with plan sponsors, this conversation offers valuable insight into building strong internal partnerships that support compliance and business goals.
Transcript:
David Hall Hello and welcome to In-House Counsel and HR Perspectives. I’m your host, David Hall, Chief Administrative Officer at Hall Benefits Law. This podcast is dedicated to exploring how in-house counsel and corporate leaders collaborate to drive compliance, innovation, and business success. Before we begin, I’d like to thank our sponsor Hall Benefits Law, where we help businesses maximize the value of their employee benefit plans while minimizing legal risks. We’re proud to support these important conversations. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome two guests from Wayne Sanderson Farms, Jeremy Kilburn, General Counsel, and Sarah Town, Associate General Counsel. Wayne Sanderson Farms has been a leader not only in the food production space, but also in legal and HR collaboration, especially in the realm of benefit plan management. We’ll be discussing today how Jeremy and Sarah worked alongside their HR and benefits teams and with HBL to successfully negotiate third party administrator pharmacy benefit manager contracts. With that process revealed about their internal alignment, how legal collaboration supports fiduciary oversight in a fast-moving, operationally complex business like theirs. Jeremy and Sarah, thank you so much for joining us.
Jeremy Kilburn Thanks David for having us.
David Hall Well, Jeremy, let’s kick things off with you. We’d like to get to know you a little bit before we dig into the ins and out of your and Sarah’s day to day. Tell us a little bit about your legal career, Jeremy, and how you arrived at Wayne Sanderson Farms.
Jeremy Kilburn Yes, thanks David. I’ve had a little bit of maybe of a non-traditional path to a legal career. I actually had sort of grown up in and around the agricultural and food business. Several members of my family were involved in agriculture, including the mob sort of integrated poultry industry. And I had sort of gone a scientific path. I wanted to get into the industry, but I was pursuing a master’s degree in chicken nutrition of all things. Got to the end of that course of study and realized I didn’t like working in a lab and thought, you know, I’ll go to law school. I could probably, you know, get out and practice with this background and do work for some food industry clients. So I went to law school, worked in Atlanta for a few years with a labor and employment law firm and ultimately early in my career landed a job as an in-house attorney as associate counsel with Wayne Farms which was the predecessor to Wayne Sanderson Farms. Did that for a few years and then started my own law practice in a small town but did, I still stayed close to agriculture. kept Wayne Farms as a client as well as a lot of other agricultural industry clients, including some of our suppliers today and customers today here on the Wayne Sanderson side. But that did that for about 10 years and came back in-house with what was then Wayne Farms as the prior general counsel was going into retirement and assumed her role as the general counsel of Wayne Farms. And then we went through the merger and acquisition process with Sanderson Farms job got a lot bigger but a more complicated and caused me to have to bring on good help like Sarah. So I’ll turn it over to her to tell how she she got into this role.
David Hall Yeah, Sarah, same question.
Sara Towne Yeah, so it’s interesting because I think I also have sort of a non-traditional trajectory to get here, although very different from Jeremy’s. Right out of undergrad, I actually got a job with a law firm overseas doing project and business consulting work. So I was bouncing around to different projects in different countries for a couple years. And then I got a little homesick, so I moved back to the US where I worked for the same law firm, doing mostly, again, of business consulting in the immigration space. At a certain period of time, I also came to a realization that if I really wanted to sort of take the next step my career probably needed to go to law school. So that’s what I did and then after law school I worked for a couple years in the insurance defense space, got a little litigation experience before I landed here. Yeah, working for Jeremy.
David Hall Now tell me, where did you live when you were traveling overseas.
Sara Towne So I was in London, I was in Dubai, was in Bangalore, and I was in Frankfurt. Yeah.
David Hall Well, that is some real globetrotting you were doing.
Sara Towne Yes, yeah, and it was the best time to do it. It right out of college. I didn’t have family or children or those kinds of obligations yet, so it was a good time to do it.
David Hall Well, tell me, Sarah, as associate general counsel, and congratulations by the way you were recently promoted, how has your role evolved with the company, especially relative to compliance and HR partnerships, which we’ll talk about in a moment.
Sara Towne Sure. So I joined the company right before the merger happened, sort of in anticipation of becoming a much bigger company. really, I think I started in almost the, like a Wayne Farms legal role. And then, you know, all of us had to adapt really quickly and change to the demands of the Wayne Sanderson Farm legal world, which were bigger and more complicated and faster. and I think while our processes got bigger and more complicated, a lot of us sort of saw a need to carve out some areas of specialization just to make things more efficient. And for a couple of different reasons, I gravitated most naturally towards like the HR benefits kind of space. So,
David Hall Okay, wonderful. And then before we jump into our next set of questions, I do want to just follow up, Jeremy, just as a side note, I’ve never heard of anyone studying chicken nutrition. It’s fascinating. It makes sense that that would be something people would need to study. But, you know, tell me a little bit, and the audience more importantly, a little bit about this merger and what that meant to the organization in terms of your total employee count.
Jeremy Kilburn Yeah, no, we actually have two PhD chicken nutritionists on staff here with the company who formulate the diets and things that we feed our birds. So it actually did is it’s an interesting field to study. Now, so for the merger, was an interesting, know, Wayne Farms is a company of about 10,000 employees. We had annual revenue of roughly two, two and a half billion, depending upon the year. We had 10 operations across the southeast. Sanderson was actually a larger organization had about double that in their revenue and about 16, 17,000 employees. sort of the Sanderson had been a public company and as a part of the acquisition, we took them private and just as a result of sort of our performance over time on the Wayne farm side, the thought was by our ownership group which was Cargill and Continental Grain, they were sort of the ones that put the deal together was they really wanted the WayneFarms management team and WayneFarms CEO to sort of drive the new company. And so that’s what we did. And it’s worked out very well. think we have a very, the companies had some similarities in their cultures. I would say I think on the sort of the role of legal department, the WayneFarms culture and mindset was a lot different in the business. And so that’s sort of been my task with this new larger company is getting my team, you know, built the way that we’re, you know, the way that I want them to be built or the way that best serves the company. that that’s been a bit of a struggle, but overall as a new company, we are, we’re not new, but we’ve been merged since August of 22. We have around 26, 27,000 employees nationwide. We partner with over 2000 family farmers who grow the chickens that we process and sent to stores and restaurants. And we have 20, facilities across the southeast.
David Hall Well, I’ll be transparent and just share a story. Whenever we visit my in-laws in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, we always get a huge kick out of driving past the Wayne Sanderson Farms facilities. Just knowing some of the people behind the operation and our partners having visited some of your facilities, it’s always just a neat thing to know that that’s a real impact that both you and our firm is having on the people that work in those facilities. Let’s talk a little bit about collaboration. We could spend multiple podcasts talking about M &A and what that meant and what that process was like, but that’s a conversation for another day. The purpose of this podcast is to talk about how we bridge the gap between different stakeholders, stakeholders like legal, HR, law firms, other service providers, right? So let’s talk a little bit about collaboration. And Sarah, I’ll start with you because you mentioned that when you got…into your legal career, you naturally gravitated towards things like HR and benefits. How do your legal roles organizationally, your department, intersect then with the HR and benefits teams at Wayne Sanderson Farms?
Sara Towne So I could answer that question I guess a couple ways. I’ll start off by saying I think, I don’t think there’s any other organization in the country where HR and legal works as closely as it does, honestly. it was funny I was talking to Jeremy. This really is the Jeremy Kilburn model of…creating that relationship and that relationship of trust and being a true partner where you’re advising but you’re also listening. those buildings of those relationships I think allow us as a legal to be in those early planning discussions so that part of our company strategy moving forward is one where legal considerations are at the forefront of the planning process instead of just reacting or putting out fires at the back end. That’s because we’re in those conversations, we have those relationships, we have those trusts. Talk about the beginning.
David Hall That’s great and I don’t want to bring up &A too much but that’s one of the things that we’ve seen as a law firm is that when benefits and HR aren’t collaborating that oftentimes the result of that can be, it can ding the company valuation. It can create liabilities where there really shouldn’t be liabilities. So to see the way that you interact with your benefits team, some of whom I was just with a couple weeks ago, and it’s fun to be around them because of their enthusiasm for what they do. It’s just nice because you know that that rising tide lifts all the boats within the organization and you’re not really leaving anything on the table and creating liabilities which is wonderful. Again because of some of the horror stories that I’m sure our legal our partners could tell. So Jeremy back to you for a moment. What is a typical interaction between legal and HR look like? And maybe you could give an example of when you’re making a major vendor decision or doing some sort of an internal compliance update. How do you guys interact on a day-to-day basis?
Jeremy Kilburn You know, I would say first off it’s constant. It’s really a constant touch point. And you know, we’re fortunate in both the HR organization and legal organizations here truly are valued as business partners across the organization. And that is really the expectation is that we’re, you know, the…that we add value, that we bring something to the table. And we have, I believe, sort of obtained the respect of lot of our peers in the organization. But I think that the biggest thing is where our team tries to make sure we have a lot of face time with all the different functional groups. And particularly, and Sarah has done this with that benefits team, as being involved in the benefits committee, she has been very involved with the 401k and as we have implemented not just our TPAs and not just PBMs, but other sort of benefits related vendors, whether it’s short-term disability insurance. We have been very plugged into that process from the beginning. And I would say it’s just kind of second nature for the HR group to come to us when they have those sort of changes to say, this is something that we’re thinking about. What do you guys think? And that really, that makes our job easy in the sense that then we do get to be involved on the front end of crafting whatever benefit solution that may be that we’re offering. We’re there at the front end in terms of whether it’s the vendor selection or even just the overall ideation of that program.
David Hall That’s fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about fiduciary risk as we shift the conversation a bit from who you are and what you do and what your organization looks like to this idea of providing oversight from the legal department relative to service providers. And some of the work that we’ve done together, we’ll get into a bit more detail in a few minutes. how do you, what’s your mindset around? oversight of service providers, Jeremy. And then I’m going to ask you, Sarah, you can be thinking about this while Jeremy answers. What are some systems or strategies you have in place to document conformance and kind of reduce risk across the organization?
Jeremy Kilburn So, I would say, before Sarah’s involvement, before Hall Benefits’ kind of pre-merger really, a lot of those vendor selection decisions didn’t necessarily involve legal or there was minimal input. We’ve always had a practice, and all companies have this procedure where, hey, if you’ve got a contract, legal’s got to review it. But when it comes to customer contracts, when it comes to construction contracts, when we’re buying equipment, my team is very equipped to assess those risks, to balance those risks with business interests. And we have a pretty good feel for, if I’m negotiating a contract with a customer, I’ve negotiated other customer contracts, have a pretty good feel of sort of their tolerance level from a business perspective to some of the asks, some of the things that we’ve, limitations on indemnity, limitations of liability provisions, all of those things make a lot of sense in what I would call a bilateral contract negotiation, which is what historically most in-house legal departments are good at. Sort of in the fiduciary space and in the space of where we’re negotiating, yes, it’s a bilateral contract with a TPA or with a PBM. We’re not the only two parties. There’s our plan beneficiaries who also have an interest in the outcome of that negotiation. have an interest in the deliverable that comes from that contract. And so that was really a of a mindset shift that we kind of had to go through, had to get our benefits team on board with that, you know, hey, don’t just bring legal this contract to review, you know, and expect us to be able to add value. So that’s a big reason why we engaged, you know, Hall Benefits to sort of help us with that. Because when it comes to understanding what’s more. In those agreements, we know you guys have a lot more visibility. I yes, my team negotiates hundreds of vendor contracts, but we only negotiate one PBM contract every few years. So you guys help us sort of bring value, help us know what’s market, but also just that whole subset of fiduciary law and what’s evolving out there from a regulatory and case law perspective and how that all fits into the contract that we’re negotiating. Most in-house teams just don’t have that skillset or that knowledge base. And so that’s what’s been great for us to sort of rely on you guys as an external partner to bring that knowledge so that we can really protect the company’s interests, but also serve in that role as fiduciary of those plants.
David Hall Well, we’ve talked with other guests on this very podcast about highest and best use, right? And so bringing in specialists for certain types of work certainly makes sense in many circumstances so that you guys can focus on keeping the main thing the main thing, right? And making sure that business is running and ticking like a clock, right? And there’s no gaps. So Sarah, this is a pretty broad question. You can share as much as you’re comfortable, but what systems or strategies specifically does Wayne Sanderson Farms have in place to document compliance, reduce risk, and then some of that collaboration we talked about earlier, how do you feel like that strengthens your ability to meet your fiduciary obligations as an organizational whole?
Sara Towne Sure, so there’s a couple of them that come to mind. Obviously, the documenting kind of the robust discussions we have during our benefits committee meetings is really important and really good record of just how much the company is considering and looking at and really trying to…turn over those really granular decisions with regards to our plan, like really paying attention to the details. I think one of the things that’s really come out of the recent work we’ve done with HBL is a pretty robust kind of contract negotiation plan. One of the things that I think separates benefits contracts from other contracts we look at is how key the time, well, is the fiduciary risk and also the timing, right? So if we’re thinking about a TPA agreement, so yes, our TPA agreement is one that we renew every three years. As part of our fiduciary duty, we need to be thinking about regular RFIs, RFPs, market checks, right? If we estimate that the contract negotiation process us is going to take six to nine months if we’re really being aggressive and doing the things that we want to do. And the fact that the timing has to take place in order to allow for timing for open enrollment. There’s only certain times we can change things. So the contract, thinking about contract negotiation, we can’t just do it as things come up for renewal. We really have to be thinking about multi-years, multi-contract strategy, which means we need to, like, first of all, identify what our pain points are, but also remember how far did we get negotiating those in our last contract? What do we want to do for our next contract? And building sort of this multi-contract, thinking about, we’re going to negotiate these points here to set us up better for negotiating these points in our next contract. And thinking about that really long-term process has been key really in developing, I think, really robust kind of strategy for these contracts. So I’ve, you we’ve developed a lot of internal communications between Legal and the benefits team, then also HBL, and sort of combine that. We’ve got a contract management system, you know, that we’re making sure we’re recording all the wins that we get, but also all the…losses that we didn’t get in this contract so that we can make sure to get it in the next one.
David Hall Well, and from the perspective of Marissa law firm, know, the things that you’re saying are music to our attorney’s ears because not only are you proactive, which is that’s our brand, right? We want we want our plan sponsor clients to be proactive and be thinking about the future. And what’s the what’s the you know, what is the the cost of not taking this action now, but not only being proactive, but being strategic, right? Because you can be strategic and make changes that benefit the organization in the moment. then what? Right. And so what’s been really nice about working with Wayne Sanderson Farms is that you are both proactive and strategic, which really allows you to squeeze the most value out of those relationships with our team and quite frankly, you know, put your company in a better position and protect yourself from fiduciary breach litigation, which we all know is is at least on the group health plan side. We believe about the skyrocket and we’ve been saying that for a number of years now. And so you guys will be the beneficiary of that, no pun intended, when the proverbial poop hits the fan, right? So let’s talk a little bit more specifically about third-party administrator contracts, pharmacy of benefit manager contracts. Jeremy, what initially prompted your team to take a closer look at the existing TPA agreement? We’ll start there.
Jeremy Kilburn You know, I think just, you know, we had gone through the process of sort of post-merger, having to figure out who are we gonna use as our TPA, who is gonna be the TPA for this new combined much larger, you know, pool of beneficiary healthcare plan. And I think just, you know, negative experiences with…you know, both prior TPAs, lessons learned, things that both of them could have done better, sort of really led us to realize that this needed to be more than, this needed to be a lot more than just an RFP. This is a part of that RFP we need to preview and identify to those vendors, hey, here are the things you’ve got to get better at. And ultimately, I mean, it comes down to making sure the fees and costs are in line with the marketplace, but also that transparency is there. We’ve had a difficult time getting data, the sort of data that we need to…kind of dive into the analytics to determine, what are the preventative healthcare sort of things that we can do as a company? What initiatives can we drive amongst our employee population to improve health outcomes overall? And we just weren’t getting that data and that information from our TPA partners in the past. that’s, health insurance plan is not just to pay bills for things that happen. We sort of view our healthcare plan as more of a program where we’re trying to more positive and better health outcomes for our employees that are participants in the plan. And you can’t do that without data. And so that was just kind of a aha moment for us. It’s like, we’ve got to push a little harder in this process to make sure that we’re getting what we need to help our plan beneficiaries become healthier.
David Hall That’s excellent. And I’m really glad you’re talking about outcomes for employees. We talk a lot at HBL and you can find plenty on our website about saving companies money and the ways that we can help protect you from fiduciary risk. At the end of the day, the fiduciary of these group health plans is supposed to be looking out for the best interest of the participant. And that’s not just their pocketbook. The pocketbook is a nice cherry on top, but you’re talking about driving health outcomes and having access to your data that allows you to be strategic in the way that you’re approaching benefits. Looking into the future, as you talked about earlier, Sarah, which I think is a forward thinking organization, what is this impact going to be on our participants? Sarah, this question can be for you or Jeremy, but I’d love to hear from you. What were some of the pain points or risks that you discovered in the original TPA agreement?
Sara Towne Yeah, so I think a lot of those are sort of what what Jeremy mentioned earlier. I mean, obviously we had transparency concerns. We had concerns about fiduciary duty liability, especially as we sort of just expanded into a a larger company. This initial TPA negotiation was also more complicated because we signed a three year agreement. But for the first year we were actually two separate plans and then on the second year we combined into one plan. So thinking about the sequencing of moving from two plans to one plan during a contract was more complicated also. And just sort of wanting to make sure that we were getting…the best we possibly could for our members given our increased size and increased market share was obviously something we were very interested in.
David Hall And then was there anything that surprised you about the negotiation process in terms of what was uncovered, how you resolved issues, response from the TPA, levels of pushback, any just general observations because this is something I’m hoping that we can share with other large employers. So I’m sure anything you share would be enlightening.
Sara Towne Yeah, so one of the things that surprised me, think…was, you know what, I should say our benefits team had previously been involved in contract negotiations, but I think didn’t have an understanding for how much they could ask for. The TPA we were negotiating with is one we, at least at Wayne Farms, has had a relationship with for a long time and have a very positive relationship with. And initially there was some discomfort about asking for things or pressing for things given this long-standing and really pretty positive relationship. they, think the HR team needed a little reassurance that yes, it was okay to ask for these things and actually more than okay, we shouldn’t be asking for these things. We’re required to ask for these things and really push, you know, for things like transparency and also fee reduction. It’s part of our duty to the healthcare plan. So yeah, I was a little surprised about that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that they weren’t used to that kind of negotiation, but I did find it a little surprising.
Jeremy Kilburn Yeah, and I would just say, think that goes back to what we talking about earlier of trying to be a strategic business partner and ensuring, and Sarah would not have been able to sort of make that push and kind of push for that better result had she not established good relationships internally with the HR and benefits team and earn their trust. Because at some point you have that conversation of like, I get it, but listen, just trust me, this is what we got to do and you want the business partner to go, alright, that’s right. I trust what you’re doing, I trust the process that you’re employing here, let’s go through it together.
David Hall Just a very interesting observation about the negotiations that our team has done. You mentioned that you had a long-term partner on the TPA side that you’ve been working with and there is a desire to keep those relationships. And what’s nice to see is that you used the term, Jeremy, the first time we sat down to talk about this. think it was you and Ann Tyler had a conversation and I sort of…you mentioned the tail wagging the dog, right? We hope the days are over of the tail wagging the dog. It’s great to have a good relationship with your TPA, but you need to know what’s in that contract, right? You need to understand what fees you’re paying. You need to understand how much you’re actually spending, right? Because some of those numbers are so opaque and unavailable, quite frankly, hidden in complex contract language. So for me, the biggest surprise when I look at these negotiations is that usually the plan sponsor sticks with their existing vendor because they have a relationship and that’s okay. But sometimes that relationship needs to be rebalanced appropriately according to what’s what’s you know in the books in the law right and so it’s nice to see Sarah you mentioned the impact that you had on the HR team to say it’s okay, right? It’s okay to ask for Something that’s market. It’s okay to ask, you know Show us that what you’re offering us is market so that we can have a point of you know point of commonality and point to to begin these negotiations from so I just really love the way that you guys have approached this from a legal perspective, the way that your legal team, again going back to beginning of our conversation, collaborates and influences your HR team because you have a deep understanding of the law and they have a deep understanding of benefits programs and so when when you have those two things come together it’s almost like you create a superpower.
David Hall Let’s talk a little bit about pharmacy benefit management. This is something that’s been in the media every day. If you’re in benefits or if you’re on the legal side with a plant sponsor, you’re reading or seeing news about pharmacy benefit managers from comments the president makes all the way on down. So you also recently went through a PBM contract negotiation. How did that approach from your perspective differ from the TPA negotiation process? what’s your, from your perspective, what’s different about TPAs and PBMs and just those types of entities?
Jeremy Kilburn Yeah, and I’ll start there. mean, I think, you know, with the TPAs and to Sarah’s point, I mean, a lot of times you, benefits group and those TPAs have a long standing relationship. And they work closely together, you know, constantly as a part of, as a part of that rollout of, you know, your open enrollment every year as part of just day to day claims management and manage and stop loss claims, all of those sort of things. So promote a very close working relationship, which does make it tough then to have that tough that hard conversation about, you need to deliver more. I think PBMs are a little different in that they’ve always been a little bit of a black box. They’re not as much of a…sort of, it’s not a service-based relationship the way that a TPA is in my mind. There’s not as much of that day-to-day interaction. PBMs, you know, we’ve had ongoing disputes with our PBMs for years about ownership of data and things that, prior to HBL’s engagement, things that we were arguing with their lawyers about, hey, who owns the data? You know, got to show me, you got to me see behind the curtain here. You say we’re getting rebates, you know, is that true? And how much of the rebate are you passing on to me? And I need transparency to that. And we got into arguments about, you can’t have that as my data. our retort would be, well, then that makes you a fiduciary under our plan, and you need to share it. And it was just this sort of circular argument that we had been getting into with every single PBM negotiation. I would say, from my perspective, you know, the need to aggressively negotiate a PBM contract was a storm that had been brewing for a while with us. And we approached that negotiation with a true degree of skepticism as we went through that RFP process, as well as then that individual negotiation, you know, just because of that experience. So was much less of a business partner and much more of what I’d call a transactional relationship, if that makes sense.
David Hall Makes a lot of sense. Sarah, could you tell me, was there anything that was a top priority for Wayne Sanderson Farms when you approached the PBM agreement? I know with the TPA agreements a lot of times it’s making sure we get the lowest fees, right? Making sure we understand some of these rebates that you may also see referenced in PBM contracts. What were some top priorities for Wayne Sanderson Farms when you approached this PBM negotiation?
Sara Towne Yeah, mean, one, two, three, four, and five is transparency for this contract. mean, had that as an issue that even before LegalGuard involved these conversations, our benefits team was really pushing for. that had just, you know, their request really had kind of fallen on deaf ears for a number of contract negotiations making sure we understood why the fees were the way that they were and also, especially for our benefits team, was why are they increasing and really trying to get to the bottom of those questions.
David Hall Excellent. Any other overarching comments around pharmacy benefit manager contract negotiation or TPA contract negotiation, Sarah and Jeremy?
Jeremy Kilburn You know, I would say we’ve seen nearly in every state where we operate, we see, you know, bills being introduced about, you PBMs to your point. You hear the president talking about them. hear the secretary of health and human services talking about them. So I think, you know, just that increased sort of, you know, public scrutiny, you know, our assumption has to be that our plan members are going to have that same sort of level of, you know, scrutiny or suspicion and that we really need to make sure that we are buttoning down those contracts as best we can to protect our plan members, but also to ensure we’re short circuiting any potential fiduciary litigation.
David Hall Excellent. I want to make one last shift. know we’ve shifted a couple of times here. Let’s go back to the chicken industry for lack of better term. You guys process chicken and make it into food. So it’s a demanding industry. There’s a diverse workforce. And I think our listeners can imagine some of those challenges, especially in today’s political environment. How does that impact, how does your industry specifically impact the way you manage benefits and compliance?
Jeremy Kilburn Yeah, that’s a good question. think, and Sarah can speak more to this, but we do have a very diverse workforce with 26,000 employees. think we have as many as 26 languages spoken across our workforce. So a lot of immigrant labor, lot of refugee and asylum seekers who have made their way into the country and have found their way to the communities where we operate. for good employees. that’s one of the challenges then is sort of just that language capacity as well as making sure we have picked vendors that can meet those employees where they are, help them to understand. They may not come from places where health insurance and the health insurance system is similar to where it is here. So our challenge to the vendors is…If it’s hard for me to read an explanation of benefits and understand, I owe a copay or not, then we’re making this too hard. You’ve got to find a way to really help our employees understand what services are they entitled to under our plan and what is going to be their financial obligation when they have those services. With a large and diverse workforce like we have, that’s a tall order.
David Hall I love that answer Jeremy. So Sarah I’m going to piggyback off of that answer from Jeremy and just ask you, and I normally wouldn’t ask an attorney this question right, but you do have this penchant for HR and penchant for benefits. How does Wayne Sanderson Farms, from your perspective Sarah, ensure transparency and engagement, right, engagement with this diverse workforce? I’d love to hear some examples across such a broad and varied workforce. I mean you mentioned 25 plus languages, right? A diverse geography, probably a diverse group of ages. Certainly you’ve got men and women. So how do you, ensure transparency and engagement across that workforce?
Sara Towne So I’ll start off by saying that anything that I say is literally just, it would just be the very tip, tip, tip, tip of the iceberg of the work that our benefits team does because this is really, I mean, it’s central. I hear about this almost every interaction I have with Christy, the head of our benefits, about how can we get more engagement, how can we get our numbers up? And it’s something they’re constantly thinking about, they’re constantly refining, they’re constantly trying to make better. I mean, just again, tip the iceberg. Translation services is something we utilize quite a lot. The other thing that I know Christy thinks about too is certain cultural competencies. Like you wouldn’t necessarily think about the relationships that different nationalities have with their doctors and how that’s different across countries. Like one of the things that we noticed is that certain locations with certain nationalities had a much higher hospital utilization rate. And that’s because in certain countries, your use, it’s more common for you to use a hospital as your primary care physician. So how do we reach out to those employees, not just from a language perspective, but also from a cultural perspective to give them education? You know, it’s challenging. It’s also, so all our plants have a position called the employee benefit specialist, and they’re the face really of our benefits team. The amount of time that Christy and her team spends with those individuals, training them on benefits explaining how we how we should take different approaches is is a lot a lot a lot a lot of work.
David Hall Well, let me just put a plug in for your benefits team. You’ve already said it several times, but they are such a dynamic and thoughtful and caring group. And your comment about Christie, coming to you, how can we get them more? How can we get them more engaged, right? How do we make this experience better for them? And I think that, again, calling back that partnership with Legal, the fact that you’re impacting those conversations that they’re having with participants says a lot about your approach to the end of our conversation just based on the time we have available and I mean I think we could go on and on but I would love to hear perhaps. Let’s end with some advice. So I’d like for each of you to think about what advice would you give to someone who is in a similar sized organization, sitting in the seat that you’re sitting in, who is either never experienced negotiating a third party administrator contract, maybe about to consider. Negotiating a PBM contract or they just work with a diverse workforce. What’s some great either career advice or day-to-day? Where the rubber hits the road? What’s the best advice you would give someone that is looking to hear wisdom from you Jeremy will start with you
Jeremy Kilburn I can make it easy and just say make sure you pick a good outside outside counsel partner. But which we think we’ve done. We know we’ve done, but know what I mean. I think. You know back to what I said a minute ago. I mean, you know, is your. You know, as attorneys mean, yes, all contracts are complicated, but what we’re really after is is making sure that.
David Hall Thank you.
Jeremy Kilburn The experience that the our employee or any plan beneficiary is having is, know, just when you’re reviewing your contracts, think about that. Think about the experience that they’re going to have. How do we drive those vendors to ensure that we’re delivering something that’s easy for them to use? Part of what you want to try to recruit employees for is have a good benefits program. It’s easy to use. That helps with employer retention. It helps with recruitment. All of those things help your company run, help us produce the chicken that, the 20 million head of chicken that we raise and process that we eat. It’s all back to that employee experience and really sort of putting, taking off your lawyer hat sometimes and putting on the hat of the guy that’s working on a D-bone line. And how do we best structure this contract to benefit him? And is he getting the bank for his buck for his dollars that he’s spending at a healthcare plan? That’s sort of way I think you have to approach it.
David Hall Sarah, what about you? Final takeaways?
Sara Towne Yeah, I mean think it’s actually in line with what Jeremy just said, but these benefit contracts, they’re very expensive. They touch a lot of people. And the litigation risks are really high. So it’s like you’ve got this trifecta of very…stressful contract negotiation issues. And I think what I always try to do is have a really good understanding for the impact of the contract. So what Jeremy says, how is it going to affect somebody on the deep online? How is any changes I make going to, that we make going to affect how this contract is implemented on the ground? And we’re really lucky that our benefits team is very keyed in to that so we can rely on their partnership to help give us that information. But also I think it’s, know, when we’re partnering with a company like yours that’s negotiating these contracts, it’s also important for you guys to understand the impact. also important for you guys to how we work so that that partnership is seamless, not only between benefits and inside legal, but outside legal too, because we’re all negotiating the same contract together.
Jeremy Kilburn Yeah, and I would just say, mean, one of the things we try to do is we onboard outside counsel and we did this with you guys. Not all of them willing to do it, but you guys were. And that is go to our production facility, walk the floor, know, see the world where employees live and understand, you know, as you’re walking through, you’re hearing the languages. mean, and just seeing the work that’s involved and understanding what it is that we do sort of helps you, I think, helps the law firm, you know, be a better partner to the in-house legal department.
David Hall I think it’s telling that that thread of the employee runs directly through everything that you, Jeremy, and you, Sarah have shared with us today. Unfortunately for me, that does wrap up this episode of In-House Counsel and HR Perspectives. And I’m just so grateful, Jeremy Kilburn and Sarah Town from Wayne Sanderson Farms, that you’re willing to share your story of cross-functional collaboration and legal leadership, true leadership in action. So thanks to our sponsor, again, Hall Benefits Law at HBL. We are committed to helping organizations maximize the value of their employee benefits while staying ahead of regulatory risk.
I do hope that you and the audience will join us next time as we explore more stories from the field, whether it’s about vendor negotiations, fiduciary strategies, or innovations under employee benefits law. Until then, please remember in compliance, collaboration is key. Thank you, Jeremy and Sarah, and thank you for listening.
