Pensions disputes
‘It is this pension team's “service mindedness, well-prepared advice, ability to challenge the advice of other lawyers” and “commercial reality” that respondents value.’
Chambers UK, 2013
Pensions litigation forms a vital element of our comprehensive pensions practice, which also features non-contentious pensions and regulatory expertise. Advising on both domestic and cross-border litigation, we have local expertise on the ground throughout Europe, Australia, Canada, Africa and Latin America to handle the full range of pensions disputes.
Our dedicated pensions litigation team acts for a number of global financial institutions, multi-national corporations, pension fund trustees and other leading players from the pensions, insurance and life assurance industries on some of their most commercially sensitive and strategically important disputes.
We deliver:
- Deep and longstanding pensions involvement; our team will comprise a mixture of pensions and pensions litigation practitioners. Our team also includes members of the NAPF City and Eastern Group, the International Pensions and Employee Benefits Lawyers Association, the Association of Pension Lawyers, the Financial Services Lawyers Association and advisors on the CBI pension panel
- The benefit of working with a full-service international firm; we can draw on the expertise of our global specialists in investment, regulatory, corporate, tax, and employment and labour, among other practice areas
Our areas of work include:
- High Court litigation (including seeking rectification orders)
- pensions Ombudsman and TPAS complaints
- professional negligence
- ADR (particularly mediation)
- judicial review
- trustee claims to PPF Ombudsman
Our recent work:
- Advising a UK manufacturing company on rectification of pension scheme rules relating to equalisation (where equalisation was, in effect, reversed). We achieved a rectification order for our client by way of summary judgment and also obtained an order for expedition (the first time an order has been granted in a pensions rectification case)
- Advising as part of a cross disciplinary team in relation to an appeal against the calculation of the risk-based levy imposed on a defined benefit pension scheme by the PPF (including complaints to D&B, the PPF and the PPF Ombudsman)
- Advising a trustee client on a judicial review
- Advising an international company on the application of surplus on the termination of its pension plan, including advising in connection with a dispute with a plan member culminating in an action in the High Court
- Advising trustees on rectification and estoppel issues (and ultimately on a dispute thereon with an adviser)
- Advising trustees on a dispute as to whether a section 75 debt has arisen under the historical statutory provisions