Nkem Ekwukoma: The Legal Storyteller Making Law Accessible for Women Entrepreneurs

As the founder of The Legal Storyteller®, Nkem has spent over two decades navigating the upper echelons of corporate law — inside FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 companies — before choosing to bring that same level of legal thinking to the women building businesses outside of those boardrooms.

In this Movers and Shakers profile, Nkem talks to us about building legal confidence without the jargon, the moment that changed everything, and why the delay in getting your legal foundations in place is itself a decision.

Nkem, for readers who are meeting you for the first time, how would you describe who you are and the work you do?

I build a bridge. One side is the legal landscape — contracts, risk, protection, the foundations that determine whether a business lasts. The other side is the business owner, trying to grow, trying to scale, trying to focus on the work she actually loves. My job is to connect those two worlds so that founders can cross confidently, without fear and without a law degree.

I do that through The Legal Storyteller®, where I champion legal literacy for business owners. Because here is what I know to be true: access to law and being legally literate is directly aligned to access to opportunities and growth. Right now, too many founders – particularly women, women of colour, and people from marginalised communities – are being locked out of that access by a profession that has historically patronised, excluded, or simply ignored them. I am trying to disrupt that.

I bring 24 years of experience gained inside FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 companies. The legal infrastructure that protects the biggest businesses in the world? There is no reason why small businesses should not have access to the same standard of thinking. So that is what I bring.

But I do not just hand you a contract and walk away. That would be like giving you a brand new car with no keys. You own it, but you cannot use it. That is, unfortunately, the experience most business owners have had with legal — impressive-looking documents sitting in a folder, completely disconnected from how they actually run their business.

What I do instead is help you understand it, use it, and bake legal risk management into the way you operate so you can focus on building, with the tools and confidence to grow without limits.

Your brand name, The Legal Storyteller, is memorable. What does it mean, and why did you choose it?

Well, if I’m being honest, it chose me. The name came in a journaling session, and it was what I can only describe as a divine download: the whole premise of what the brand would be,  what it stood for, who it was for. It arrived in a moment of complete flow. The words were coming faster than I could process them. It didn’t feel like it was coming from me. And then I ignored it. I  felt that the name was childish. I tried other names instead.

The first name that I actually used for my business was ‘Stand in the Gap,’ which I constantly had to explain. I stand in the gap between no advice and paid legal advice. It was just a mouthful. Then I chose ‘Leigally’ because the domain for the actual word ‘Legally’ was going to cost me £26,000, and I was not paying that. 

People mispronounced it, and nobody got it. I went back to my journal, back to the name that had been given to me divinely. The moment I made the switch to The Legal Storyteller, the response was immediate. The interest, the curiosity, the recognition of the familiarity of storytelling and the resulting softening of the word “legal”. It was a marked difference, and I think that was God saying, “I told you.”

What first drew you to law, and did you always know you wanted to work with entrepreneurs and business owners?

I actually wanted to be a journalist, and my mum – my Nigerian mum – told me to pick again as there was no job security.  I was a huge fan of the TV show LA Law, was on the debating team at school and genuinely believed I could change the world as a lawyer.  So law it was.

I always knew I wanted to work in business. Corporate and commercial law made sense to me in a way that crime or consumer law never did. I wanted to be where decisions were being made, where things were being built.  But working with entrepreneurs the way I do now was never the plan. By the time I found my way to this work, I was not even planning to stay in law at all.

I was hit by the boulder effect.  I ignored the pebbles I experienced in the years I spent leading legal teams, doing serious commercial work across major corporations, and still experiencing what so many Black lawyers like me experience. 

The pebbles were the micro-aggressions, the code-switching, the constant monitoring of myself to avoid making others uncomfortable. When George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter conversation took hold, I finally had language for what I had been living for years.

I watched white peers move through the same spaces with a fundamentally different experience. But I persisted and was head hunted for a role where again I led a team of lawyers, this time in a toxic work environment.  This culminated in me having a traumatic miscarriage and then being signed off work.  I returned to an exit interview.  The exit was a gift, but I appreciated it in hindsight.

After picking myself up from the sunken place, the exit gave me the opportunity to explore my black book of business ideas I had been collating as a covert multi-passionate. So I leant into building a clothing brand rooted in my Nigerian heritage. In 2020 I flew to Nigeria to meet artisans. COVID hit. I got stuck and had to be repatriated back to the UK. I joined a business coaching programme to help with logistics. Inside that programme, surrounded by women entrepreneurs, I entered a challenge to make a thousand dollars in a few weeks. I prayed about it. The answer that came back made no obvious sense: run a legal masterclass. I was trying to leave law, not return to it. But I followed the answer. 

I charged at first. Then felt led to refund everyone and make it free. Over fifty women showed up. One of the coaches had a word with me afterwards and said: “this workshop was outstanding.  You want to build a clothing business with no experience — but look what just happened here. Why not cut your teeth building a business where you already have experience?”

That conversation, and the divine download that preceded it, changed everything.

Many founders see legal matters as scary, expensive or something to deal with later. What do you wish more business owners understood from the start?

Founders know more about the legal aspects than they realise and it’s not their fault that they don’t know, they just haven’t been shown.  Every business has its own story – the who, what, why of it all.  It’s like this beautiful cake or delicious confection and the legals are the wrapper that keep the dust and grit out.  Without the business the legals don’t mean anything, but with direction and strategy, business owners can take ownership of the legal landscape of their business.

Also, I wish business owners understood that the earlier you start, before an issue arises, the easier and cheaper it is to get right.

Think about it like a car service. You pay for regular maintenance to keep the engine running. But if you ignore the warning signs, keep driving and hope for the best, eventually you are not paying for a service. You are paying for an entire engine replacement — because you did not notice you were burning it out. Legal is exactly the same. The founders who engage early spend less, stress less and grow faster than those who only pick up the phone when something has already gone wrong.

I also want founders to understand that legal is not a one-time fix. It is not a box you tick and forget. It is infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, it needs to grow with the business.

What are the most common legal mistakes you see small business owners make?

The biggest misconception I see is that once you have a contract, you are protected. People download a template, sign something, and assume the job is done. But legal risk is not static. It changes as your business grows, as your clients change, as the work becomes more complex. Founders end up running reactively — firefighting late payments, disputes, difficult client relationships — rather than designing systems that prevent those problems in the first place.

Beyond that, there are five areas where I consistently see exposure: contracts that do not reflect how the business actually operates, business relationships and arrangements that were never properly documented, intellectual property that was never formally protected, data practices that do not meet current standards, and not preparing for growth opportunities

None of these are complicated in isolation. The problem is they are usually all happening at once, quietly, in the background, while the founder is focused on growth. And nobody has ever mapped them together for that founder and said: here is where you actually stand. That is a big part of what I do.

How can women entrepreneurs protect their ideas, content, services and intellectual property without feeling overwhelmed?

As with any journey, you need to know where you are first before you can start to map your route to get to your destination.  So, I would suggest that you start with an honest audit of what you have created.  First, let’s identify what you have.  Go through your business systematically. Most women I work with are generating enormous value through their frameworks, their methodologies, their content — and they have never formally claimed any of it. It is not that they do not care. It is that they do not know what they do not know.

Look at your brand assets, your operations, your USPs, data practices, your growth plans. Then step tow would bet to map what your exposure could be – can a competitor access your most valuable frameworks or processes? Do your employees have access to confidential information with nothing in place to protect it if they leave? That diagnostic process of mapping your actual exposure rather than guessing at it is where clarity comes from. And clarity removes overwhelm. Once you can see where you stand, the steps become manageable.

I also think every founder needs to understand her own legal risk appetite. Some people are naturally cautious. Others are more entrepreneurial. Neither is wrong. But until you know how much risk you are actually willing to carry, you are making decisions in the dark.

You work at the intersection of law, business and storytelling. How does storytelling help people understand legal issues more clearly?

Legal principles on their own are abstract. They live in documents and definitions, cases and statutes.  They’re not really relatable, but when you show a founder what happens to a business like theirs, when a key clause is missing, or when ownership of something was never formally established — it lands differently. It stops being theoretical.

I had a client who saw legal as a box-ticking exercise, but in the first fifteen minutes of our first call, while I was simply asking questions to understand how his business operated, he had a road-to-Damascus moment. He could suddenly see the gaps not because I lectured him, but because the right questions, asked in the right way, told a story he recognised as his own.

Remembering a story or an analogy is far easier than remembering a list of bullet points. That is not just a nice communication style. That is how legal confidence actually gets built.

What has building your own brand taught you about visibility, trust and credibility?

That trust is built through value, consistently delivered in public. You cannot build credibility from behind closed doors.

I had two decades of legal expertise before I launched The Legal Storyteller. But expertise alone does not create a brand.  There are lots of experts out there that have failed in business, not necessarily because they deliver poor services, but because they are unable to relate to their audience, to their customers. I had to unlearn the instinct to lead with qualifications and instead show up with a clear point of view.  I was willing to challenge a profession I am part of, willing to say the things that traditional lawyers do not say.

Through firstly showing up consistently in the free legal club I set up when I first launched the Legal Storyteller, whether I had an audience of one or thirty one, through my partnership with the British Library, where I run workshops and training for small business owners,  through my LinkedIn Learning courses and through my Legal Stories newsletter, I have seen what happens when legal is made genuinely accessible.

People engage. They lean in rather than step back. When you flatten the barriers to access and meet people where they are, trust follows naturally. That has been one of the most important lessons of building this brand.

There is also an expectation, particularly as a professional, that everything you put out has to be polished and perfect before it is credible. Building this brand taught me that is simply not true. Showing up consistently and authentically — even imperfectly — builds more trust than waiting until everything looks exactly right.

Have you ever had a moment in your career or business where you had to back yourself, even when the path was uncertain?

I remember when I was made redundant from a role, and I knew that I needed to just take the time to breathe, having been at the company for 10 years. I didn’t look for a role, I didn’t make any applications, and believed that I would get something because I really believed in myself.  I was headhunted for a role whilst enjoying that space and time. 

Trying to leave law, was another moment.  At that point in time, my identity was in tatters as it had been tied to my role as a lawyer, a role that I had just been exited from.

So I committed to creating a clothing brand, flew to Nigeria to meet artisans, got caught in a pandemic and had to be repatriated home. None of it was going to plan. I found a coach who specialised in building African fashion businesses. But I felt strongly led to join a particular group coaching programme so I did.   This led to the money making challenge that led to the inception of the Legal Storyteller.

It made no sense on the surface. Backing yourself definitely does not always look like a bold, clean leap. Sometimes it looks like following an answer that does not quite make sense yet, and trusting it before you have the evidence. The evidence came later.

What does success look like for you now, and has that definition changed over time?

It has changed completely.

Early in my career, success was about proving I belonged. Qualifications, technical excellence, being seen as safe hands. I now know that being impressive is not the same as being impactful.

Today, success looks like a founder who came to me overwhelmed and now confidently negotiates her own contracts. It looks like the business owner who understands his legal risk profile and uses it to attract better clients. It looks like the woman who sends me something to sense-check and I have nothing to add — and I am genuinely delighted by that.

At scale, success looks like a legal profession that has been disrupted enough to actually serve the people it was supposed to serve all along. That is the direction I am building in.

But success for me also looks like freedom in time and autonomy to carve my own path, not one that has been well trodden.  It was either the law firm partner or a General Counsel at a FTSE 100 company both of which although very credible would take me in completely the opposite direction. 

What advice would you give to a woman of colour in business who knows she needs to get her legal foundations in place but keeps putting it off?

The delay is a decision. Every week you put it off is a week you are operating on a foundation you have not checked. And I understand why it gets pushed down the list — when you are already carrying more than most, legal does not feel urgent until it is.

But we are often building without the safety nets others take for granted. We cannot afford to also be building without legal protection.  Imagine scaling to the top of a mountain with speed because there are no ledges or cliffs.  Without building the legal systems -which honestly do not have to be complicated – you may rise quickly to the top and slip just as quickly to the bottom without those ledges and cliffs.

Finally, what is the legacy you want to build through The Legal Storyteller?

I want legal literacy to be a ‘thing’ the same way financial literacy is a movement, thereby creating a community of legally literate business owners who themselves have confidence and credibility as a result. I want to flatten the barriers to accessing law and legal resources — and, in doing so, entirely redefine how law is perceived. Removing the fear. Removing the apathy. Replacing both with confidence and action.

As I mentioned earlier, access to law and being legally literate is directly aligned to access to opportunities and growth. That is not a nice idea. That is a fact. And right now, too many business owners are being denied that access by a profession that has never prioritised them.

The Legal Storyteller was not my plan. It was given to me. I resisted it, tried to rename it twice, and eventually surrendered to it. And every time I have trusted it, it has been right.

If this brand can be the reason a founder walked into the most important moment of her business life properly protected, properly confident, and properly prepared — and if I can do that at scale, consistently — that is the legacy I am here to build.

Ready to take the first step?

If Nkem’s words have landed — and we suspect they have — here’s where to begin.

The Legal Exposure Snapshot is a free assessment that gives you a clear picture of exactly where your business stands legally. No jargon or overwhelm. Take the free assessment here.

For something more in-depth, the Legal Infrastructure Diagnostic is a focused audit where Nkem examines your legal landscape with you, identifies the gaps, and produces a concrete report and way forward. Find out more and book your discovery call here.

As Nkem says: the only wrong move is staying still.

Connect with Nkem on LinkedIn