Women’s History Month: Y.C. Maikyau SAN Salutes The Smart And Feisty Superstar, Olufunke Adekoya, SAN
Funke Adekoya was born on the 7th day of March, 1952 in Birmingham, England. She obtained her LL.B. from the University of Ife in 1974; was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1975 and then proceeded to Harvard Law School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA for an LLM in 1977. She was appointed a Notary Public in 1986.
Mrs. Adekoya joined the league of extraordinary ladies of the Nigerian Bar, when she was conferred with the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 2001 – the 5th woman to be conferred with the rank in Nigeria. In 2004, she was enrolled as a Solicitor in England and Wales. She became a member of the Body of Benchers in 2001 and was made a Life Bencher in 2007.
Until 28 February 2022 when she retired, Mrs. Funke Adekoya was a founding partner at ǼLEX Legal Practitioners and Arbitrators, a full-service law firm operating in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Accra, Ghana; where, for 18 years she headed the Dispute Resolution Practice Group which manages litigation and arbitration matters for the firm’s clients. She has almost 5 decades’ experience in commercial litigation and corporate dispute resolution, and regularly sits as an arbitrator in high value institutional proceedings under the LCIA, LMAA, ICSID and ICC Arbitration Rules. She also participates in ad hoc arbitration proceedings in international and domestic disputes.
Mrs. Adekoya provides legal representation for domestic and foreign clients and advises foreign counsel and their clients on Nigerian government and regulatory compliance issues as a dispute avoidance mechanism. She is knowledgeable in both Nigerian and English Law and has acted within Nigeria and abroad as counsel and co-counsel; she has also appeared as an expert on Nigerian law issues in foreign courts; in Turkey, the UK and the United States of America.
Mrs. Adekoya is a member of Nigeria’s ICC National Committee; the Panel of Neutrals of the Lagos Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration and the Nigerian Communications Commission. In the international legal arena, Funke is a member of the African Users Council of the London Court of International Arbitration as well as the Lagos Court of Arbitration. She has been accepted onto the arbitration panels listing maintained by the Kigali Center for International Arbitration as well as CIETAC, the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission. She is also a member of the ICCA–ASIL Task Force on Damages in International Arbitration. She sits on the international appointment committee of the Scottish Arbitration Centre, and was a Vice President of the Governing Council of ICCA (International Council for Commercial Arbitration). She is also a former member of the World Bank Group Sanctions Board.
Funke is a member of the Nigerian Bar Association, and served as the Association’s First Vice President from 2002 to 2004. She is also a member of the International Bar Association, a Life Member of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), member of the International Bar Association’s Legal Practice Division and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (UK).
She has received numerous awards in the course of her career as a legal practitioner. Earlier in the year, she was selected by Chambers Africa as the Nigerian Lawyer of the Year 2022; right on the heels of her winning the Africa Arbitration Association Arbitrator/ADR Practitioner of the Year in 2021. Prior to this, she was in 2007, nominated as the Most Outstanding Female Legal Practitioner of the Year by the Financial Newspaper and Women Entrepreneurs African Network.
Funke has been described as a beacon of conscience and integrity at the Bar. She has been known to fearlessly insist on doing the right thing despite whose ox is gored. She is a very vocal advocate for the full recognition of women in the legal profession. In her words, “I cannot understand why they say there are no ladies at the Bar. I am at the Bar and the last time I checked, I am a lady!”
I celebrate her today for her outstanding work ethics and for her immense contributions to the NBA and the legal industry, particularly the arbitration space; and to legal education in Nigeria.
Yakubu Chonoko (YC) Maikyau
Chairman, NBA Welfare Committee
