The barefoot lawyer
For over fifteen years, Patrick Andrews was a corporate lawyer, negotiating joint ventures and acquisitions for multinationals across London, Moscow and Shanghai. In 1999, sent to China to help set up big-box stores for a UK retailer, he found the moment that eventually ended that career.
"What I was doing was helping this company, that was already huge, to grow even more, and nobody could explain to me why that was a good thing," he says. "I couldn't even ask the question, because growth was the religion of the organisation."
He left corporate law in 2008. A stint in the not-for-profit world, which he found equally flawed, and years writing a book in a remote Welsh cottage followed, before he took the name Barefoot Lawyer in 2013: borrowed from the barefoot doctors of 1960s China, who carried only what they needed to make healthcare accessible to the rural poor. Accessibility, stripping away pretension so the work could be done together with the people it’s for, has stayed the point ever since.
"We got everyone in a room and mapped it out on the floor," he says. "This is what a co-op feels like. How does that feel?"
"What I was doing was helping this company, that was already huge, to grow even more, and nobody could explain to me why that was a good thing," he says. "I couldn't even ask the question, because growth was the religion of the organisation."
That was his approach at Library of Things. Instead of proposing a structure, he had the founders physically test how different ownership models felt, and arrived at a golden share: an ownership device few UK companies had used, keeping the business accountable to the community it served.
The same instinct, arrived at independently before he had heard the term steward ownership, shaped his three-year work with Guy Singh-Watson at Riverford, and his eight years as a director of Riversimple, the hydrogen car company founded by Hugo Spowers.
"I remember sitting in a cold shed in Devon with people who pack vegetables for a living, talking about employee ownership," he says. "They were coming alive, more than people in suits in law firms ever did."
Today that same approach shapes Yoak, which Patrick co-founded with Erica Neve in 2024. The work is less about any single business now and more about the connective tissue between many: advising founders and funders on ownership, governance and capital together, and building shared infrastructure such as The Third Seat, a new custodian for golden shares.