Pendragon Managing Director and Co-founder Simon Freeman retired at the end of June. Simon founded Pendragon with Robin Ellison in 1996 at a time when legal research in pensions involved out-of-date printed reference materials, was always time-consuming and often all but impossible.

With this in mind, Simon and Robin approached 30 leading pensions organisations with the idea for a pensions information service. In response to their proposal, 12 organisations agreed to fund viability and specification research into the concept. The subsequent report welcomed the idea and concluded there was “a great and urgent need for an effective and up-to-date pensions information database”.

Simon, who has extensive litigation experience, was keen to develop a single research resource in which amendments could be rolled back so that finding out what the law said on a particular date in the past or the future no longer involved following an extensive paper trail. This vision would eventually come to life as Perspective’s unique “time travel” feature.

In 2022, led by Simon and with support and counsel from Robin, Pendragon has been at the forefront of electronic information provision in the pensions industry for more than 25 years. The driving force behind the development of Perspective and its continuing success lies in the endeavours of Simon and Robin to ensure that the database was born from the clearly defined requirements of its potential users. Simon retires with Perspective thriving — a market-leading product carrying over 22,000 documents and with subscribers from across the pensions world who rely on it for all their research and to find and follow all the latest developments.

Looking ahead to his retirement and enjoying a new “perspective” on life, Simon said: “I developed Perspective to be the kind of legal research tool that I had wanted when I was a litigation lawyer even before my involvement with pensions. It was then unavailable and largely remains unavailable elsewhere today. I leave the pensions industry resourced with the most powerful research system available in the legal world. I’d like to thank all those at Pendragon, now and in the past, who have contributed to its success and all those in the pensions industry who have given us so much support over the years. I am more than confident that Pendragon will continue to thrive in the safe hands of its existing team under the imaginative leadership of Raf.”