Pension-sharing orders will be available as one of a possible range of ancillary relief orders in cases where the petition was filed on or after 1 December 2000.

Readers should know the law by now: here are a few practical tips to bear in mind to help you cope with the new situation.Combating the deadline beatersWhat do you do if your opponent tries to steal a march by filing a petition before 1 December? Does that mean that pension sharing is ruled out? Not necessarily.

Provided there is as yet no decree absolute, and your client also has grounds for divorce, there is no reason why the respondent should not file her own petition on or after 1 December.

It would then be for the court to decide how the two petitions were to proceed.

While one cannot guarantee that this would succeed, the court should be able to see through the motives behind the first petition and to be sympathetic to the plight of the respondent.

Where there is a decree nisi, the position might be more problematic but not impossible.

It would certainly be wi se to file an answer to any petition in these circumstances to delay progress.A new one for the word processorParties, or potential parties, to an application for ancillary relief have certain obligations whenever either of them 'has or is likely to have any benefits under a pension arrangement'.

That definition covers most of us.

Within seven days of receiving notice of a first appointment in an ancillary relief application, a party with pension rights must apply to the person responsible for his pension arrangement for certain information prescribed by the Pensions on Divorce (Provision of Information) Regulations 2000 regs 2(2) and 3(b) to (f), and then serve it on the other party within seven days of receipt.

In essence, this information is a valuation of the benefits, the method of valuation and details of the nature of the benefits.

Prudent practitioners should put draft letters on their word processors now.

If you know an application for ancillary relief is pending, you can get this information in advance since a party who has a valuation which is less than 12 months old at the date of the first appointment may serve that valuation rather than applying again to the person responsible.Specifically apply - and servePension sharing must be specifically applied for in Form A (see Family Proceedings Rules 1991 (FPR) r.2.53(1)), and the application must specify the terms of the Pension-sharing order sought (r.2.61A(3)).Do not forget that if your application for ancillary relief contains an application for pension attachment (the new name for earmarking) and, arguably, for pension sharing, a copy of Form A must be sent to the person responsible together with, in the case of attachment applications, certain further information which is listed in FPR r.2.70(7).

The person responsible may request a copy of para 2.16 of your Form E, to which he is entitled.

These requests must be attended to promptly: time is quite tight leading up to the first appointment and you would not want to be the solicitor who had caused an unnecessary adjournment.Drafting the orderParticular attention must be paid to forms of order.

There is no prescribed order as such, but r.2.70(13) states what the order must contain.

A distinction must be drawn between the body of the order and the annexes to be attached to it.

The contents of the annexes are prescribed by rr 2.70(14) and (15), depending on whether the relief sought is pension sharing or pension attachment.In the body of the order, there must be a statement that there is pension sharing or pension attachment in accordance with the annex.

A suggested form for the body of the order might be as follows:'Provision is made in favour of the applicant/respondent by way of pension sharing AND/OR pension attachment in accordance with the annexe(s) to this order.'The rules as to the contents of the annexes are self-explanatory and there is little point in reciting the contents here.

It seems that a model form of annexe should be available by 1 December, but, even if it is not, a standard form should not be too difficult to work out.

It is crucial to remember that district judges are unlikely to be willing to draft the order and annexes for solicitors.

A minute of the order and draft annexes must therefore be produced at the hearing.

In particular, the following matters are important and require thought: the annexe must state the percentage of the respondent's pension benefits which is to be transferred (Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 (MCA) s.21A(1)(b) (as amended)).

The order cannot take effect until t he expiry of the prescribed period, that is the time for appeal from the judge who makes the order plus seven days (MCA s.24C(1) and Divorce etc (Pensions) Regulations 2000 reg 9(1)), nor until decree absolute (MCA s.24C(2)).Do bear in mind that there cannot be both pension sharing and pension attachment in respect of the same pension arrangement (see MCA s.24B(5)).

It may be necessary to make a choice between these two remedies, which is not always easy; for example, how do you balance the need for attachment of death-in-service benefits with the desire for a share of the pension? Where there are children and support is being paid, even through the Child Support Agency, what might happen in the event of the death of the father is highly relevant.

Finally, the question of the pension provider's charges must be addressed: how much are they and who is to pay them?These are all relevant matters whether the order is by consent or disputed.

However, when the order is by consent, certain other formalities must be observed.

By r.2.70(12), not less than 21 days before the court considers the application for a consent order, the applicant must have served the person responsible for the pension arrangement with notice of application, draft order (and annexes!) and the information required by r.2.70(7).

This is to give the person responsible time to file a statement objecting to all or part of the proposed order.

Any statement filed will, of course, have to be considered by the district judge.Time of the essenceAs to appeals and/or variation, remember that an order for pension sharing cannot be varied in any respect after it has taken effect, and once the order has taken effect any appeal will be a very uphill struggle.

Time is certainly of the essence.So there is quite a lot of food for thought here which must be digested before we even start on the more difficult question of what difference the availability of the new remedies will make.Any difference?Will pension-sharing orders become the norm, or will they be as relatively uncommon as earmarking orders have been? Is White v White [2000] 3WLR 1571 where Lord Nicholls added the pension values to the other capital values with no comment, an indication of how the court should treat pensions in the capital distribution?One can only hazard a guess as to what the future has in store.

Before White, my personal view was that pension sharing would be more popular than earmarking because it is compatible with a clean break but that, nevertheless, it might only be appropriate in the case of fairly long marriages where the parties were over 40.Now, the position seems less clear.

If the yardstick of equality must be measured against any proposed order, and pensions are part of the family assets with no distinction to be drawn between them and other immediately available assets, there is at least room for considerable argument.

It is of course arguable that the pension values in White could be properly aggregated because the parties were aged about 60.

However, that, like a number of issues, remains to be debated.