Pension sharing orders: why family solicitors should introduce advice early

In a long marriage, accrued pension rights can rival or exceed the equity in the family home. Yet pensions receive a fraction of the attention the house gets, partly because they are invisible in daily life and partly because neither party truly understands what the numbers mean.

For the family solicitor, this creates an uncomfortable asymmetry. You can negotiate the split, draft the order and secure the decree, but the question of whether a proposed pension share is actually fair in outcome, rather than merely equal on paper, is a question of financial analysis that sits outside your retainer and, for most solicitors, outside their professional indemnity comfort zone.

Most negotiations begin with cash equivalent (CE) values supplied by the schemes. These figures are convenient and dangerously easy to treat as comparable. They are not. A CE from a defined benefit scheme and a CE from a defined contribution pot of the same headline value can represent very different retirement outcomes, and CE figures for public sector and other defined benefit schemes can diverge materially from the cost of replacing the benefits they represent.

This is precisely why courts and practitioners increasingly expect expert input, whether through a pensions-on-divorce expert report or through regulated financial advice, before a share is agreed. Splitting a number is easy. Splitting a retirement is not, and a client who discovers the difference after the final order has few remedies and one obvious person to blame.

Even a well-negotiated pension sharing order still has to be implemented, and this is where clients without an adviser most often founder. The receiving party typically needs to decide:

• Whether to take an internal transfer within the existing scheme, where offered, or an external transfer to a new arrangement.
• Which receiving scheme is suitable, a regulated advice question in its own right.
• How the shared funds should be invested once received, given their age, circumstances and the rest of the settlement.

Implementation runs to deadlines once the order takes effect, and schemes will not wait indefinitely for a claimant who has no idea where the money should go. A client who only starts looking for an adviser at that point loses time, options and sometimes value.

The strongest practical argument for introducing advice early is your own timetable. When financial advice is engaged at the disclosure stage rather than the drafting stage, the adviser has time to assess the pension figures, flag where expert valuation is needed, and have a receiving arrangement identified before the consent order is lodged.

The alternative is familiar to every family practitioner: an agreed settlement that stalls for weeks because nobody can answer a scheme's implementation questions, or worse, a client who wants to reopen terms after belatedly understanding what the pension share really delivers. Early advice does not slow a matter down. It removes the single most common late-stage delay.

Clients in the middle of divorce proceedings are not well served by being told to go and find a financial adviser. Many have never used one; some have only ever experienced money through the marriage now ending. A structured, consent-based introduction fits the moment far better.

Through SmartPeer, the solicitor creates the referral, the disclosure letter is generated automatically, and the client opts in online at their own pace before any contact is made. The introduction goes to vetted, regulated advice firms with pension expertise, and the solicitor can see the referral's progress through live tracking rather than hoping the client made the call. SmartPeer never contacts a member's client except through the referral itself.

Family solicitors already identify the advice need, already make the introduction, and already field the chasing emails when implementation drags. The only thing most firms do not do is capture any of the value. SmartPeer is free to join with no monthly fees, and members retain 60 to 70 per cent of the introducer fees generated by their referrals, with commission statements that reconcile against the tracked activity.

Introducing pension advice early is better for the client, better for the timetable and better for the file. With a tracked network behind it, it is also, finally, remunerated.