Allia Khan, Head of Legal at PoloWorks in the UK, takes a fresh approach to in-house leadership – focusing on building teams differently, simplifying complexity, and questioning long-held assumptions to drive better outcomes.
What has been the most defining moment of your career as an in-house lawyer so far?
There have been a few pivotal moments, but one stands out.
Building a legal team from scratch and not in the traditional way, but through the Law Society apprenticeship pilot scheme when it first started. Instead of defaulting to hiring fully qualified solicitors, I made a conscious decision to invest in individuals straight from school and support them through qualification with us.
That wasn’t the obvious route. It required patience, belief, and a willingness to challenge how legal teams are “supposed” to be built.
But it changed everything.
It created a team that’s deeply loyal, commercially aware from day one, and grows with the business rather than trying to retrofit into it. For me, that moment defined what leadership in-house really looks like – not just managing risk, but shaping people, culture, and long-term capability.
Earlier in my career I was trained to identify risk. In-house has taught me how to build through it.
In what ways do you see the role of the GC changing over the next 5–10 years?
The GC and Head of Legal role is no longer about being the best lawyer in the room, it’s about being one of the most commercially influential voices at the table.
Over the next 5–10 years, I think three things will define the role:
• Technology integration as AI will absolutely reshape legal, but the real value will come from leaders who know where not to use it.
• Data and decision-making as Legal can’t operate on instinct alone anymore; it has to be grounded in insight.
• Relationship capital. This is the big one. The most effective GCs will be those who invest heavily in relationships across the business. Trust isn’t built in a crisis, it’s built long before it.
The future GC isn’t just technically strong they’re connected, visible, and embedded in the business.
Because if you’re only brought in at the end, you’re already too late.
How do you foster innovation and agility within your legal team?
By being honest about one thing: legal doesn’t need to be perfect to be effective.
Innovation dies in environments where people are afraid to get it wrong. So I focus on creating a culture where:
• Trying something new isn’t risky, not trying is.
• Simplicity is valued over over-engineering.
• Legal stays close enough to the business to anticipate, not just react.
We’ve tested tools, scrapped things quickly when they didn’t work, and gone back to basics when needed. That’s agility.
There’s a misconception that innovation in legal has to be complex or tech-heavy. It doesn’t.
Sometimes the most disruptive thing you can do is strip something back and ask, why are we doing it this way at all?
What qualities do you believe distinguish truly impactful GCs from good ones?
Good GCs protect the business.
Impactful GCs shape it and sometimes challenge it.
The difference comes down to:
• Commercial courage and making decisions, not hiding behind options.
• Clarity and cutting through legal noise to what actually matters.
• Trust and being the person people come to early, not when things go wrong.
• Consistency and how you show up under pressure defines your credibility.
The reality is, businesses don’t need more legal commentary.
They need leaders who can translate complexity into direction and stand behind it.
How do you balance the pressures of your role with personal wellbeing and resilience?
I don’t believe in “perfect balance”, but I do believe in intentional boundaries.
This role can take as much as you’re willing to give it. So at some point, you have to decide where the line is and stick to it.
For me, that means:
• Setting clear boundaries and not feeling the need to apologise for them.
• Being realistic about what actually needs to be done vs what can wait.
• Leading by example because teams don’t do what you say, they do what you tolerate.
There are intense periods, of course. But resilience isn’t about constantly pushing through.
It’s about knowing when to pause, reset, and protect your energy so you can keep showing up at the level the role actually demands.
If you could change one perception about the in-house legal profession, what would it be?
That we slow things down.
We don’t. At least, we shouldn’t.
The best in-house legal teams are accelerators they just ensure the business is moving in the right direction.
Legal isn’t there to say “no.”
It’s there to say, “yes but here’s how we do it properly.”
And when that shift happens, legal stops being seen as a cost centre… and starts being recognised as a strategic advantage.
