Pensions
Tailored legal support for your pension arrangements.
Pensions are complex and highly regulated, which in turn can make them tricky to navigate. As legal experts, our role is to help you cut through that complexity to understand what the rules mean in practice.
We can support you and your business to understand your obligations and responsibilities in relation to pension arrangements. Our expertise includes private-sector schemes and participation in public-sector schemes.
Request legal advice on pensions
Why choose us?
We work hand in hand with you and your other professional advisers throughout every step of pension arrangements, whether that’s establishing, amending, closing, winding up or merging pension arrangements. We will also support you in addressing issues such as scheme deficits and the strategies available to manage them.
In addition to supporting employers and business owners, we also advise trustees, scheme administrators and pension providers to help them understand their obligations under complex pensions, trust and tax law.
Corporate transactions
We will support you at every stage of a corporate transaction. We work closely with our market-leading, award-winning Corporate team to conduct stringent due diligence to identify potential issues at the earliest possible stage of the transaction.
We will ensure any pension considerations are properly identified and documented, including appropriate warranties and indemnities. We are used to supporting clients in their discussions with pension scheme trustees and the Pensions Regulator, making the process as smooth as possible for you and free of any risks that may cause delays.
Employment
We have a leading, multi-regional Employment team who can support you with all related matters as an employer or business owner. Drawing on our expertise, we can assist them with drafting pensions clauses for employment contracts, staff handbooks, and settlement agreements, and with advising employers on their obligations generally, including under automatic enrolment.
We also assist with staff consultations on proposed changes to pension schemes and with pension issues arising from redundancy exercises.
Documentation
Pension arrangements naturally come with lots of associated documentation and paperwork – you must keep these up to date as things change with your business and your employees.
We will work with you to establish the documents and put processes in place to help you manage and adapt pension arrangements as their circumstances change.
This can include
- preparing bespoke or standard documents
- amend pension scheme documents
- appointing or removing trustees
- managing employer’s participation in an occupational pension scheme.
Pension disputes
If a pensions dispute arises, we can support you, your trustees, and scheme managers in understanding the concern raised by the scheme member and in exploring resolution options constructively, and in mitigating the risk of escalation into a formal complaint.
If a complaint does progress further, we can advise on responding through a scheme’s internal dispute resolution (IDR) procedures or in proceedings before the Pensions Ombudsman.
To avoid this, we can work with you to establish your IDR procedures if none exist, or support the review of existing ones before a new scheme is introduced.
Related experience
SSASs and SIPPs
SSASs and SIPPs are tax-efficient pension schemes available to employers which offer high investment flexibility. SIPPs are personal pension schemes, while SSASs are occupational schemes for business owners and company directors, ideal for you as an owner-manager.
We advise many scheme providers and can provide them with standard documentation for Small Self-Administered Schemes (“SSASs”) and Self-Invested Personal Pensions (“SIPPs”). Our experts advise members, scheme administrators and trustees on interpreting the legislation and case law.
Working with our commercial property and corporate colleagues we also regularly advise SSASs and SIPPs on whether proposed investments can be made under pensions and tax law.
Pensions as a business
If pensions are your business, you’ll know that there are many facets to the industry, which continues to be challenged to generate returns for scheme members that provide sustainable retirement incomes.
Each firm in the industry contributes to that goal and is a unique business dealing with deliverables and risks, including legal risk.
Our experts are uniquely placed to help pension providers, advisors, suppliers and outsourcers meet their strategic and business goals and manage their risk.