Addleshaw Goddard managing associate Ellen Beardsworth on speaking up early, understanding clients, and why lawyers should be careful not to let AI do the thinking for them
“Senior lawyers much prefer spending five minutes answering a question upfront than fixing work that went off-track because a junior made assumptions.” This, says Ellen Beardsworth, managing associate in the infrastructure and energy team at Addleshaw Goddard, is the first thing she would tell anyone starting out. “Law firms are less hierarchical than they once were”, she adds, and “there is truly no such thing as a stupid question”.
This lesson is one shaped by her own early experiences. When Beardsworth graduated during the aftermath of the financial crisis, law firms were shrinking trainee intake and opportunities were scarce. After taking a year out to travel, she began her legal career as a paralegal, working on everything from mortgage fraud and professional negligence claims to landlord and tenant disputes.
A training contract followed, consisting of four seats that in fact “felt like six or seven because of the range of work”. Corporate work, contentious and non-contentious construction, intellectual property disputes and a secondment at a national transport company exposed her to a remarkable breadth of work at this early stage, after which she made the decision to qualify into construction.
She had expected to end up somewhere else entirely. “I always assumed I would end up as a contentious lawyer because I did not think daily transactional work was for me unless I was deeply interested in the subject matter,” she says. Yet, she made the switch to projects at Addleshaw Goddard, after reading a job advert which “mentioned trains and wind turbines” and seemed to, in fact, be designed for her.
Eight years on she is still at the firm, with the variety of work proving ever engaging. As she puts it, each project, client, contract, regulatory context and sector differs, so there is “no time to be bored”.
This constant change is why adaptability tops Beardsworth’s list of skills for aspiring project lawyers. “For junior lawyers, adaptability is key because no two projects or sectors are identical,” she says. Wastewater in the Middle East, solar installations in Hull and EV arrangements for Volkswagen are all examples of the kinds of diverse projects she has worked on. Despite this, she reveals that though the sectors can vary significantly, the core underlying principles of commercial contract law do not, and the lawyers who thrive in projects are the ones able to flex their skills between the different areas.
As well as working with a wide variety of clients, junior lawyers in this practice area gain exposure to the full lifecycle of major infrastructure projects. On one matter for Yorkshire Water, for example, the AG team advised at the outset on available government incentives, helped design the procurement process and negotiated the contracts needed to inject biogas into the national gas network, reinforcing the opportunity to get stuck into novel solutions in the energy and infrastructure field.
The second skill she raises as a crucial one for junior lawyers to develop is “practical commercial awareness: moving beyond identifying contract changes to explaining what those changes mean for the client’s risk profile and operations”. Spotting the amendment, in other words, is the easy part. Explaining why it matters is where lawyers add value.
This distinction becomes particularly important in long-term infrastructure and energy projects, where contracts can remain in place for 15 or 20 years. Drafting that seems sensible today may become problematic as technology, regulation and market conditions evolve. The challenge for modern lawyers is, therefore, to draft with enough flexibility to accommodate future developments, whether this means digital transformation, new energy technologies or changing environmental standards.
Time spent embedded within client legal teams on retainer arrangements has sharpened Beardsworth’s own commercial insight. “Internal legal teams and their clients do not want reams of black-letter law; they want a genuine opinion, clear direction, and an explanation of risks and practical impacts” she reveals. “Providing pages of legal analysis without a clear recommendation is not helpful to non-lawyers.” A secondment at Network Rail also taught her that effective legal advice must align with business realities, including corporate decision-making timetables, board approvals and budget cycles.
Her next lesson to aspiring and junior solicitors is to make your interests known.
“When I express interest in specific types of work, partners remember and actively try to provide that exposure,” she mentions, describing senior colleagues who are “genuinely invested in my career development, approachable, and supportive whenever issues arise”.
This advice stems from personal experience. Early in her career, Beardsworth expressed an interest after a partner casually mentioned a deal in passing. This conversation ultimately led to her advising Volkswagen on its global strategic alliance with Ford, working on the electric vehicle workstream through which Volkswagen supplies its EV technology platform to Ford.
The scale and complexity of the project were remarkable. Beyond the legal drafting, the work required an understanding of vehicle design, supply chain logistics, quality control, cross-border regulatory requirements, lifecycle management and long-term technological development. It also involved intensive week-long negotiation sessions in Germany attended by over 100 representatives from the two companies. When the Covid-19 lockdowns arrived in 2020, negotiations moved online and the agreements were ultimately signed remotely. “It was an international, high-profile project that resulted directly from speaking up and seeking out the opportunity,” she recalls.
When it comes to AI, Beardsworth is clear about both its potential and its limitations. She recognises the significant efficiency gains the technology can offer but is equally conscious of the risks; including hallucinations (particularly in heavily regulated sectors) data security concerns and confidentiality issues.
More fundamentally, she warns against junior lawyers becoming overly reliant on AI-generated outputs, cautioning that doing so “risks undermining the development of essential legal skills”. Understanding how to analyse a contract, interrogate a clause and spot issues independently remains integral to being an effective lawyer. She also identifies transparency, as a key non-negotiable when it comes to how juniors should use AI.
Beardsworth also alludes to the broader commercial awareness lesson buried within this AI debate, as many organisations are grappling with these same questions surrounding the transparent use of AI. She points out that in public procurement processes, for example, the use of unsecured public AI tools can create significant concerns, ranging from confidentiality breaches to the possibility of anti-competitive outcomes if multiple bidders rely on the same systems to generate tender responses. Understanding why clients view these risks seriously is precisely the kind of commercial thinking Beardsworth believes lawyers should develop alongside their technical legal expertise.
Her final piece of advice is perhaps the most practical, yet often the easiest to overlook when deadlines are looming: always build in time for a cold read.
“Taking the time to review your work with fresh eyes before submitting it significantly improves quality,” she recommends. Senior colleagues, she notes, would much rather receive work that has been thoroughly reviewed and refined than something rushed over the line for the sake of an artificial deadline. A slightly longer turnaround agreed in advance, is, more often than not, a price worth paying for substantially better work.
Ellen Beardsworth will be speaking more about her career at ‘Northern roots, global reach: The opportunity of decentralisation — with Addleshaw Goddard’, an IN-PERSON student event taking place at the firm’s Leeds office on Monday 16 November. Secure your place.
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