We speak to Goodwin’s Andrew Pollock
Goodwin investment funds partner Andrew Pollock believes lawyers who excel are those able to see beyond the task in front of them. “We’re all playing a tiny role in a much bigger picture,” he tells Legal Cheek Careers, stressing the importance of understanding clients’ businesses and the wider commercial context. That mindset, he says, is reflected in Goodwin’s “industry-immersed” approach to training and “entrepreneurial” culture, which encourages lawyers to “go and build something”.
Pollock’s route into law was not especially planned. “I don’t think it was that I particularly intended to be a lawyer to start with,” he says. A love of English literature led him to study the subject at university, initially with teaching in mind. But summer schemes at City law firms shifted his thinking. “I loved the buzz of being in the City and feeling like you were at the heart of the driving force behind the economy,” he recalls. “That’s where things were happening.”
The solicitor route appealed because its structured training gave Pollock the chance to try different areas before committing to one. That flexibility proved useful, as his move into investment funds was somewhat accidental. He recalls an LPC tutor sketching out a private equity deal and telling the class they needn’t worry about the fund sitting at the top unless they ended up at a firm with a specialist funds practice. A third-seat stint in funds later proved decisive. “It was a perfect mix of the intellectually interesting and engaging – every fund structure is different – coupled with the corporate and commercial reality that this is about getting a constructive deal done at the end of the day,” he says. “I felt this area was a natural fit from week one.”
Pollock joined Goodwin nearly a decade ago as part of a large team move. “A big part of this job is finding a group of people that you enjoy working with,” he says. Goodwin proved “a great fit”, pairing a team that valued “collective team success” with the firm’s global platform. “It was the best thing that happened to my career,” Pollock says, particularly in an industry as international as investment funds.
That culture, Pollock says, has remained important as Goodwin’s London office has grown. “What you want as you’re coming up through the ranks is an opportunity to go out there, show that you can do it, get in front of clients, and start building those relationships from really an early stage in your career,” he says.
As a partner, Pollock says developing junior lawyers has become one of the most rewarding parts of his role, allowing him to revisit some of those earlier teaching ambitions. Recruiting, training and mentoring all form part of that, but he is clear that development is not about “spoon-feeding everything”. Instead, the aim is to create “a structure and an environment where you give people the training, resources and encouragement to believe that they can go out and deliver”.
Turning to his own practice, Pollock describes investment funds as bringing together three groups: investors with capital to deploy, businesses that need funding to grow, and fund managers with the expertise to connect the two. Lawyers help put in place the agreements governing how that capital is invested and how returns are shared. “At its heart, it is just a commercial contract governing that relationship between the capital providers, the people with the expertise, and then the businesses that need that money,” he explains.
For investors committing capital for a decade or more, certainty matters. “What you really want is certainty,” Pollock says. Recent years, however, have brought “shock after shock after shock”, from interest rate instability and inflation to wars, tariffs and the rise of AI. That uncertainty has made assets harder to price, leaving buyers and sellers more hesitant to transact and slowing the flow of capital through the market.
For lawyers, that uncertainty creates opportunities to play a more strategic role. Pollock says advisers need to look beyond simply executing a process and anticipate the challenges clients may face. “This has been a great opportunity to showcase that, and to help clients see these challenges ahead of time and think about how they can best position their businesses ultimately to mitigate against these risks,” he says.
One response to those pressures has been the rise of secondary transactions, which Pollock says can help release liquidity for investors. He also points to the energy transition, where geopolitical instability is reshaping where capital is deployed. “That has been hugely popular not just because investors see it as a positive investment case in the face of climate change, but also because energy resiliency has massively moved up the political agenda,” he says.
That commercial perspective also shapes Goodwin’s approach to training. Pollock describes the firm as “very focused on being industry-immersed”, with trainees encouraged to understand the client’s business, not just the legal task in front of them. “Clients have a business to run, and the main thing they care about is: how can you help me solve my business problems that have some kind of a legal angle?”
For Pollock, Goodwin’s training offer also draws on both sides of the Atlantic. The firm combines “the traditional UK training culture and mindset”, where learning and development remain central, with the “US global clout and power” of the wider platform. It is, he says, “quite a powerful mix”, pairing high-quality training with a global, industry-focused outlook.
When it comes to developing commercial awareness, Pollock’s advice is to start with what genuinely interests you rather than trying to second-guess what a particular firm wants to hear. “I would be less worried about what is relevant to a particular firm and more about what interests you,” he says. He recalls being encouraged as a student to keep up with the news, advice he still follows today by reading the news and listening to podcasts. The aim, he suggests, is to understand the wider commercial context rather than memorise every development.
That broader awareness also matters when building relationships with clients. “Most clients want to be able to have someone they can relate to and discuss the things that they’re having challenges with,” Pollock says. AI is one example: clients often simply want “a human conversation” about what it could mean for their business. He points to Goodwin’s work with clients on the potential impact of AI on future medical advances, as an example of how wider developments can connect with a firm’s practice. “Increasingly as an aspiring lawyer, you need to be conversationally fluent in those sorts of topics in order to interact with clients,” he adds.
Pollock’s final piece of advice is to embrace the harder parts of the job rather than look for the easiest route through them. “I would say to lean into what is difficult and is challenging,” he says. “What I have found is if you lean into what is hard and what is difficult, that is often what differentiates you and where the greatest rewards are.” As lawyers become more senior, he adds, the most valuable questions are often those “you don’t know the answers to, and that no one knows the answers to” – precisely because they are novel, difficult and offer the greatest scope to “grow and develop”.
Andrew Pollock will speaking at ‘The Big Commercial Awareness Themes of 2026-27 — with Goodwin and other leading law firms’, a virtual student event taking place Friday 6 November. Secure your place now.
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