Kevin is a group risk benefits and pensions expert who advises employers, trustees, insurers and employee benefit consultancies. Over a career of more than 30 years, he has worked with employers’ finance, risk and HR teams on the design, implementation and revision of their businesses’ benefit plans, including the operation of their group pension schemes.
Kevin’s reputation in his field has led many international businesses to turn to him for specialist, off-panel advice. His expertise includes providing specialist advice to insurers and other third-party product providers in the review and modernisation of the governing documentation and delivery of their health benefit and group risk products, and advising on legal and regulatory compliance details associated with customer-facing materials for new financial service products.
Kevin’s pensions law expertise reflects his decades of experience in advising sponsoring employers and trustee boards on the complex range of rules imposed upon them by constantly evolving statute and regulation.
Expertise
- Group life assurance schemes and death benefit claims
- Employer-funded group medical benefit trusts, and insured health schemes
- Other group risk benefit and discretionary trust arrangements, including critical illness cover and group income protection
- Large defined benefit and defined contribution pension schemes, including master trusts, advising employers and trustees on ongoing scheme management, documentation, tax rules, Ombudsman complaints, regulatory intervention, funding issues, de-risking, winding up, surplus distribution and negotiations between parties
- Small and self-invested pension schemes, advising trustees on loan and investment documentation, rule revisions, disputes between trustees and members, and death benefit payments
Experience
- Advised a global IT firm on the review and revision of its group life provision and the conclusion of separate complicated claims by members to the pensions ombudsman.
- Advised multiple motor manufacturers, institutional and international investment banks, a search engine company, energy businesses, global law firms and accountancies, restaurant chains and utilities companies, and others, on the design and implementation of their medical benefit plans for employees.
- Advised the trustees of numerous employer-funded group life assurance schemes on the identification of potential beneficiaries and the exercise of their discretionary power to distribute benefits.
- Advised two life insurers on the design and delivery of value-added services (GP services, EAP, etc.) to employees of group cover corporate customers.
- Advised two third-party medical benefits administrators on the design of their products, including tax rules, associated contractual revisions and customer materials.
- Advised a religious body on regulatory compliance and fund investment associated with its provision and administration of an authorised pension scheme master trust, and its medical benefits trust.
- Advised an insurer associated with an established church on the modernisation of its medical benefits trust to dioceses and religious orders.
- Advised the trustees of a small self-administered pension scheme on the pensions aspects of divorce proceedings leading to a landmark high court judgment.
- Advised the trustees of another small pension scheme on the transfer of funds and establishment of new trusts after the death of the original member.
- Advised an international employee benefits consultancy on the redesign of its own salary sacrifice and automatic enrolment offerings.
- Advised international law firm personnel and finance teams on the revision of its staff benefits packages.
- Provided practical legal support to numerous pension scheme trustees on their administrative and governance obligations under pensions and tax law.
Please note: The experience list above may include examples of work completed prior to joining Keystone Law.
Career
Kevin joined Keystone Law in 2023 and previously worked at the following firms and organisations:
- Gowling WLG
- Abbey National Benefit Consultants
- Aviva