Click here to see the photos from our First Anniversary Party.

We were delighted to celebrate our first anniversary in style at The Ace Hotel Shoreditch, celebrating with clients, contacts and current and former colleagues – many from the pensions industry and a wide range of representatives from the law firms to which we provide dedicated pensions support.

We have come a long way from April 2015, when Anna and Chris first conceived the idea for a new pensions law boutique, launching in June 2015 and now providing a comprehensive range of pensions law services (link to main Service page) to cover the wide spectrum of clients – now upwards of 50 – that the firm has.

The origins of the firm were partly personal – a desire for autonomy, and a desire to create something new. This was central to our strategy – to have the freedom to decide the kind of business we wanted to be part of and to be able to adapt swiftly to the rapidly changing pensions environment – and we’ve certainly achieved that.

Pensions is all we do. We can hire, promote and invest as we decide. All the firm’s time, attention and spending are devoted to the benefit of our clients. We wanted to have a flexible, adaptable business that’s fleet of foot, could adapt change quickly, go where the work is and invest where it wanted to.
12 months on, we are now 4 partners, with Anne-Marie joining in September and Rosalind in January, and 2 associates, soon to be 3. The Arc recipe is to offer high quality, partner-led advice based on many years of experience – between the 4 partners we have 100 years’ pensions experience – supported by a small team of dedicated pensions associates. Our current associates, Aby and Sarah, are soon to be another Anna, Anna Copestake, who is joining us from Sackers in early August. Our consultant, Kevin LeGrand – known to many of as the President of the PMI, now works with us on strategy and as director of Know How.
In our first financial year we beat the budget we set for ourselves. We’ve been working for trustee clients and sponsor clients, from all over the country. The work can be advisory or transactional. We advise on several big pension funds of £1 billion+ as well as some very small ones, and we recently took on our first mastertrust client.

With over 50 clients, that means we’ve taken on, on average, one new client a week, which has been very pleasing. It’s always going to be a work in progress but Arc Pensions Law no longer feels like a start up: after only a year it feels like we are a fully-fledged and established law firm.

This felt even more real after learning that we’ve been ranked in Chambers as a leading pensions firm, which is quite an achievement in our first year.
So what of the future for Arc Pensions Law?

Quite simply, we are looking to continue our growth, whilst remaining tightly focused on pensions law. We’re in conversations with pension partners at other law firms about joining and our hope is to continue to grow over the next 12 months.

With your continued support we hope to continue to win new clients from across the spectrum, new corporates and trustees, insurers, independent trustees and so on – and of course to work with more law firms, who are very important to us – and to whom we are committed to providing the highest quality and best value pensions support.

We want to thank all those clients and contacts who have followed us from our previous firms. Most have known us before Arc. But thank you also to those here who found us as Arc, specially those clients who instructed as a brand new law firm.
Thank you for the confidence you have placed in us.

Please find some photos from our First Anniversary Party for you to enjoy here.