Pensions

Our world-class pensions team can simplify the complex pensions landscape for you. Our pensions group frequently works alongside dedicated insurance, capital markets, tax, and other lawyers, to provide tailored, innovative, and seamless advice to strengthen business foundations and prospects.

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Our pensions team provides innovative and practical solutions to help clients thrive in a complex and fast-moving legal landscape.

We work with trustees, employers, insurers and public bodies to manage risk, unlock opportunities, and deliver results that matter.

Our exceptional pensions team can help drive value across all your pensions priorities. Along with strategic and innovative advice on central pensions issues, we collaborate seamlessly with colleagues across the firm, including capital markets and insurance lawyers on market-shaping derivatives and longevity solutions, tax lawyers on navigating Value Added Tax (VAT) and inheritance tax (IHT) matters, litigators on resolving complex disputes, insolvency teams on distress issues, and corporate lawyers on executing market-shaping deal.

We ensure that clients always stay ahead of developments in pensions law and regulation, through our focus on clarity and practical guidance. Our weekly Pensions Digest and monthly newsletter, along with our forward-thinking podcast series PensionsPod and NewsBeat, enables businesses to stay attuned to the shifting pensions landscape. Our sophisticated events program – including webinars, seminars, and roundtable and panel discussions - also provides a constant flow of insights and analysis, tailored to the needs of trustees, employers, insurers, and industry professionals.

Ranked highly by Legal 500 UK and Chambers UK, we deliver solutions that help clients thrive across sectors, across borders, and at every stage of the changing landscape.

Pensions Litigation

Defined Contribution (DC) and Master Trust pensions

Restructuring and Pensions

Pensions Funding

The Pension Regulator

Pensions Investment

De-risking a pension scheme demands more than pensions law alone.

Our practice connects expertise in corporate insurance, investment management, banking, derivatives, structured products, and data protection – giving you strength in both breadth and depth, and from every angle.

We can help you find the right solution for your scheme. If it doesn’t exist, we’ll shape it with you. We’ve led the market in pensions de-risking, delivering innovative structures that have redefined what’s possible.

As part of one of the world’s most respected dispute resolution teams, we represent trustees, corporates, and public sector bodies in high-stakes pensions disputes.

We combine deep sector insight with decades of experience to cut through complexity and find the most effective path to resolution. Whether the challenge is public and high-profile, or handled quietly behind the scenes, our focus is the same – protecting your position and delivering results.

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We advise on every aspect of DC pensions law, delivering clear, practical guidance on regulation and compliance. Helping you navigate change with confidence, our work spans master trust authorization, transfers, DC consolidation, and auto-enrolment.

Restructuring a business that sponsors a defined benefit (DB) pension scheme brings added complexity. The Pensions Regulator is taking an increasingly robust stance on activity affecting DB schemes, with enhanced investigatory powers, along with wide-ranging criminal and civil sanctions on the horizon.

We combine deep pensions expertise with a clear understanding of the commercial drivers behind business restructuring. Acting for both corporates and trustees, we help companies demonstrate to trustees – and, where needed, to the Regulator – how reorganizations can balance business objectives with trustees’ legitimate concerns. Equally, we support trustees in assessing the impact of restructuring on their schemes and in securing appropriate mitigation.

Every three years, a fresh actuarial valuation resets the funding conversation.

We can guide you through negotiations with trustees, shaping funding strategies, schedules of contributions, and recovery plans that balance business priorities with pensions obligations.

We design tailored packages using guarantees, escrow accounts, security, letters of credit, or surety bonds, to deliver protection trustees can rely on. Where appropriate, we structure asset-backed contributions - often through Scottish limited partnerships -creating stable income streams backed by defined assets.

With the Pensions Regulator’s new DB funding code in force, scrutiny is increasing. We cut through complexity, anticipate regulatory expectations, and can secure trustee agreement quickly and confidently.

Working seamlessly across pensions, corporate, tax, finance, and disputes, we deliver pragmatic solutions that keep schemes on track and businesses moving forward.

Imagine a finance director approving a £700 million dividend boost, without checking the pension deficit. Even with solid shareholder gains, regulators are watching. If that move threatens a defined benefit pension scheme, it may trigger anti-avoidance enforcement. Under the Pensions Act 2021, a Contribution Notice could require directors to top up the deficit or face civil or criminal sanctions.

Simplifying your group structure or reshuffling subsidiaries ranks might seem administrative, but if it disrupts the scheme’s legal status, it risks being treated as material detriment to members. That can trigger enforcement too.

We can guide you before you act, help you model insolvency risk, and build mitigation - such as trustee-agreed funding, clearance filings or documentary defenses - keeping your business moving, without compromising the scheme. With clarity, precision and our team behind you, you can anticipate regulation, not react to it.

Our pensions investment team brings together expertise from across the firm to deliver seamless, end-to-end advice on every aspect of pension scheme investments, including in relation to secondaries and illiquid investments.

Pensions, investment funds, tax, derivatives and structured products, insurance, real estate, financial regulation, and projects – all connected, all working as one.

We combine a deep understanding of regulation and markets with a sharp focus on managing risk and unlocking opportunity. For over a decade, we’ve helped pension funds navigate change, structure investments with precision, and move quickly when the market demands it.

We provide insight backed by real commercial judgment, enabling trustees and sponsors to invest with confidence and deliver long-term value for members.

Our capabilities at a glance

£250bn

We advise around 200 pension schemes with assets of over £250bn.

£5bn

In 2024, we advised on 14 buy-in and buy-out transactions with a total value of over £5bn.

Hear from our clients and industry leaders

The client delivery team at Hogan Lovells are best in class. They provide tailored, clear practical advice, taking account of our unique and often complex circumstances. We have a long relationship with the firm and it is clear they have a deep understanding of our culture and principles. This is reflected in the high quality of their work.

Legal 500 UK 2025 (client quote)

Really strong performance. We have been grappling with some very difficult issues…Very pragmatic… manoeuvred the lawyers on the other side to get to a solution.

Client feedback

They deliver best-in-class legal support tailored to our individual circumstances and reflecting their clear understanding of our culture and values.

Chambers UK 2025 (client quote)

Key contacts

Katie Banks

Partner

Katie Banks

Partner

London

Claire Southern

Partner

Claire Southern

Partner

London

Edward Brown

Partner

Edward Brown

Partner

London

Angela Dimsdale Gill

Partner

Angela Dimsdale Gill

Partner

London

Matthew Bullen

Partner

Matthew Bullen

Partner

London

Meet the Pensions team

Representative experience

Rolls-Royce on a landmark £4.3bn bulk annuity transaction with Pension Insurance Corporation plc (PIC), securing the defined benefit pension liabilities of approximately 36,000 members.

Department of Business and Trade on pensions issues in relation to the bid from EP Group to buy Royal Mail for £3.5bn.

Pension Protection Fund on the implementation of European Court of Justice (ECJ) rulings (Bauer, Hughes and Hampshire) on compensation for scheme members of companies which have failed.

Credit Suisse on the £900m full buy-in of their UK defined benefit pension scheme with Legal & General.

Trustees of the £7bn Centrica Pension Schemes on negotiating their actuarial valuation with Centrica PLC. The work included renegotiating and documenting their contingent asset security.

The Trustee of Kodak Pension Plan on the settlement of its US$2.8bn claim against Eastman Kodak, involving two ground-breaking solutions for which the team won numerous awards.

Evonik Pension Scheme Trustee on all aspects of winding-up the scheme. We previously advised on the full buy-in of the final salary liabilities with Legal & General.

Royal London on their entrance into the bulk annuity market, on four risk transfer transactions with a combined value of over £1bn.