Paula Warnock

Practice Areas

Paula’s practice is split between trustee advisory and corporate clients to distil complex legal matters into workable solutions for clients to implement. Paula works closely with fellow advisers on her pension scheme clients to provide practical advice ensuring the adviser group work as a team along with the client to produce beneficial outcomes.

Career

Having worked in the technical development team of Capita’s pensions consultancy business and the legal team at Mercer, Paula’s experience within pensions administration, actuarial and legal sectors is particularly wide ranging.

Professional Memberships

• Fellow of the Pensions Management Institute

• Full Member of Association of Pension Lawyers

• Committee member and former chair of North-West Association of Pension Lawyers

• Committee member of South Yorkshire Pension Group

Personal

Paula has a particular interest in driving forward Hill Dickinson’s diversity and inclusion strategy, being one of Hill Dickinson’s equality leads along with being a Mental Health First Aider whose role is to reinforce key messages, share knowledge and ideas, and take an active role in the planning and delivering of our calendar of events to promote Hill Dickinson internally and externally as an employer who celebrates individuality.

Work Highlights

Insolvency of sponsoring employer: advising the Trustee of a Scheme regarding the imminent insolvency of the sponsoring employer and wider group. The Scheme had a significant funding deficit and had fixed and floating security over company assets although the security would not be sufficient to eliminate the Scheme funding deficit. A pre-pack administration transaction was proposed which was expected to result in a higher level of funds being available to the Scheme than company insolvency. For the transaction to proceed the Trustee was required however to release some of the security it held and therefore advice was required to ensure the best outcome was achieved for members of the Scheme.

Corporate refinancing: advising the Trustee of a Scheme in which the PLC parent company was undertaking a major refinancing project in respect of its corporate group. The refinancing with lenders was on preferable terms for the corporate compared to the existing arrangements. The terms of refinancing however required the Trustee to release security over assets granted in favour of the Scheme and therefore could have resulted in a detriment to the Scheme. Significant negotiation was required to agree the vast suite of documents between a number of lenders, security agents and corporate entities to enable the refinancing arrangements to proceed whilst protecting the Scheme’s funding position.

Royal London Buy-out: advising the Trustees of a Scheme in respect of potentially one of the first buy-outs with Royal London as a new insurer in the pension buy-out market. Liaising with Royal London’s legal advisers to review the new buy-out terms and conditions along with agreeing the process to provide a benefit specification and disclosure documents to enable a guaranteed quote to be obtained was notable.

Education