When Tochukwu Okezie joined the legal team at Interswitch, the thing that stopped him was not a hard legal question. It was a queue. Contracts sat in it, awaiting review, and the team was small. He set about clearing the backlog the obvious way, by working through it, and somewhere in the grind he found something worse than delay. "Some of the counterparties were no longer interested in proceeding with the transactions," he says. "The business opportunities had simply moved on." A contract left waiting was not a paperwork problem. It was revenue walking out the door.
The lesson landed hard, and it never left him. "It became obvious that legal could not afford to operate reactively," he says. "We needed to build a system rather than simply work harder." Almost everything he has done since has been an elaboration of that one sentence.
Okezie is now Group Chief Legal Officer and Company Secretary of Interswitch, one of Africa's defining payments companies, responsible for the legal and governance function behind infrastructure that moves money across Nigeria, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Germany. He arrived in 2017 as senior legal counsel and rose to the top seat on merit, sixteen years of financial-services law behind him. Ask him what he is proudest of building, though, and he does not describe a deal or a case. He describes a machine for making good decisions at speed.
The first move he made toward that machine surprised people. "The first operating-model decision I made was probably the least obvious one," he says. "I hired a non-lawyer into the Legal Department." Not another attorney to share the load. Someone with a background in data, process and technology, brought in with a single mandate: digitise the function. For years the lawyers had been expected to run technology projects on top of full legal workloads, and the projects crawled. Putting the capability inside the department, owned by someone who understood the daily friction firsthand, changed the tempo. "Within twelve months of establishing the Legal Operations function, we had digitised approximately 80% of the department's core processes," he says, from contract management to litigation tracking to intellectual property. Work that had inched along for nearly three years moved in one.
What he took from that was not a lesson about software. "Technology alone does not transform a legal function," he says. "People do." The hardest part was never the tools. It was the habits, especially among colleagues across the business who found it easier to send an email than to log a request in a structured system. He answered resistance with roadshows, demonstrations and training, and by treating pushback as information about how the systems could be better. The reward was a department that stopped asking one question and started asking another. The shift, as he puts it, was "from 'How do we find time to implement technology?' to 'What problem should we solve next?'"
The function he inherited was not built for any of this. "We were a team of just three lawyers outside of the General Counsel," he says of his early days, a generalist group handling whatever arrived, with the company secretariat farmed out to an external firm. As Interswitch expanded across markets and products, he redesigned the department around specialists rather than generalists: a Litigation and Projects team, a Legal Operations team, and, once governance had grown too important to outsource, a Governance team he built after being "appointed as the Group's first in-house Company Secretary." That team now maintains a governance framework "across more than sixteen Group entities."
Sitting in the boardroom changed how he understood the job itself. He had come up measuring legal success by whether the advice was correct and the risks identified. Those questions still matter, he says, but they stopped being enough the moment he watched a board spend its time on growth, capital, product and expansion, with legal rarely the starting point. "The real value of an in-house lawyer is not measured by the number of legal opinions they write," he says, "but by their ability to help the business make better decisions." The role had changed, in his reading, not because the law changed but because businesses did.
The system he built was tested the way real systems are, under fire. During a significant commercial dispute, the first question was not about the law but about the record: could the company show that the contract had been negotiated, approved and executed the way its own governance required. The contract management platform let his team reconstruct the entire lifecycle, from the first request through every negotiated version to the final signature, and show that departures from the standard playbook had been approved by the right people. "The technology gave us visibility, the governance framework gave us accountability, and the documentation gave us confidence," he says. He draws a single principle from it, and it doubles as his argument for the whole approach. "You do not build legal infrastructure for ordinary days," he says. "You build it for the moments when decisions are questioned and every assumption is tested."
Infrastructure is the word he keeps returning to, and he means it as a rebuke to a more common one. "Legal is not a cost of doing business," he says. "It is part of the infrastructure that allows the business to grow with confidence." Treated as overhead, he argues, a legal team spends its days reacting to individual problems. Treated as infrastructure, it builds the frameworks, governance and data that let good decisions happen consistently, early, and at speed. Pressed to finish the thought for a market still writing its own rules, he does not reach for risk. The best in-house team, he says, "is there to help the business innovate responsibly, scale sustainably and build the trust that makes long-term growth possible." His line for it is blunt: "When legal is trusted as a strategic partner rather than a gatekeeper, it creates value far beyond the legal function itself."
He believes the continent he works in has an unusual chance to build this way from the start. "Africa has a unique opportunity to leapfrog legacy systems rather than replicate them," he says, to skip the decades other markets spent digitising paper that was never efficient to begin with. He is careful, though, about what technology cannot reach. "Technology cannot substitute for the rule of law," he says. It cannot manufacture judicial independence, ethical leadership or public trust, and it cannot replace the human work of negotiation and judgment. The point, for him, is not to automate the profession "but to elevate it," to strip away the repetitive so the lawyers can spend their time where judgment actually matters.
That instinct, to bet on where the work is heading rather than where it has been, is an old one for Okezie. Years before Interswitch, he left First Bank of Nigeria, one of the country's oldest and most respected institutions, for a younger company in an industry still inventing itself, a move that puzzled people at the time. "I wasn't choosing between employers," he says. "I was choosing between comfort and growth." The same conviction ran through the years he spent representing Interswitch on the Central Bank of Nigeria's Legal Special Interest Working Group, helping write the rules for a payments system millions would come to depend on, contributing, as he puts it, to "the legal architecture of an industry that millions of Nigerians rely on every day."
The lesson he carries from all of it sounds less like a lawyer than a leader. Advising boards taught him that the job is not to prove how deeply he understands a hard problem. "It is about making complexity understandable," he says. "Expertise gets you into the room, but clarity, judgement and composure are what make people choose to follow your lead."
Ask Okezie which people he would put a spotlight on, and he does not name himself or a marquee matter. He names the teams whose best work is the work no one notices, the governance that runs clean, the disputes that never erupt, the contracts that hold. Their success, he says, is measured not by how visible they are but by the confidence they give others to lead. "They don't simply support leadership," he says. "They make good leadership possible." It is the same idea as the queue he cleared a decade ago, only larger now. Build the thing quietly, build it for the day it will be tested, and if it is built right, the people who rely on it never have to think about it at all.
