Victoria Nwankwo was a freshman at Oklahoma City University majoring in business and economics when her father died unexpectedly.
“Losing my father during my freshman year of college was a defining moment,” Nwankwo told The Texas Lawbook. “As the eldest daughter, I took on significant responsibility for supporting my family. That experience forged my resilience and shifted my perspective on what constitutes a ‘crisis.’ I tend to remain calm under professional pressure because I’ve navigated significant personal adversity.”
“It also gave me a deeper capacity for empathy. I’m more thoughtful about seeing situations through others’ eyes and recognizing that everyone is carrying something I may not see,” she said.
Two decades later, those hard-learned life experiences have made Nwankwo one of the most creative and successful corporate employment lawyers in North Texas.
Now senior managing counsel at the cloud storage company Dropbox, Nwankwo last year guided the company with a $7 billion market cap through a painful global restructuring and downsizing of 20 percent of its workforce in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Singapore, Japan and Australia.
Nwankwo also led Dropbox through a rapidly evolving political and regulatory landscape and created and implemented an innovative internal resource for the company’s human resources leaders that reduces unnecessary risks and escalations and provides answers to the most common questions and issues.
“The biggest challenges have been navigating workforce restructurings,” Nwankwo said. “These are emotionally difficult situations, and my focus has been ensuring we treat people with dignity throughout the process — providing clear communication, honoring our legal obligations across all jurisdictions, and supporting our team in supporting impacted employees through the transition.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Nwankwo as a finalist for the 2025 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Corporate Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department (21 lawyers or more). The finalists will be honored and the winners announced Jan. 29 at the DFW Corporate Counsel Awards.
“Victoria navigated a wide range of high-stakes matters with precision in a rapidly shifting external landscape,” said Fisher Phillips partner Amanda Brown. “The broader political and regulatory environment — particularly in the tech sector — has become increasingly unpredictable, with abrupt changes in federal policy and heightened scrutiny of workforce practices. Against that backdrop, she delivered clear, principled guidance on complex workforce diversity issues, immigration matters, travel issues for visa holders and data privacy security concerns.”
“In every instance, she provided balanced, legally defensible and operationally grounded solutions that allowed the business to move forward confidently despite the surrounding uncertainty,” Brown said. “Over the last year, Victoria has delivered an extensive portfolio of high-impact achievements across global employment law, organizational strategy, compliance and technological innovation.”
Carrington Coleman partner Marisa O’Sullivan said Nwankwo is a “trusted partner — not just her client’s lawyer.”
“Vicky is open-minded, persistent, consistent, even-keeled, analytical, solution-oriented, and has always maintained an internal compass that seeks fairness,” O’Sullivan said. “No matter what the issue, she delivers a steady hand and a considered, poignant response.”
Nwankwo is “a phenomenal leader because she’s a forward-thinking visionary,” said Bria Riley, senior lead counsel for retail banking at Citigroup in Dallas. “She’s always thinking steps ahead about how she can improve processes, increase efficiency, and make it easier for her counterparts and clients to resolve issues.”
Dropbox Deputy General Counsel Shaunicie Fielder said Nwankwo is “brilliant and attentive to detail.”
“Victoria asks all the right questions. She is solutions-focused and understands which details matter,” Fielder said. “She solves problems before they become serious.”
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Victoria Nwankwo discusses the traits she seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with her and more.
Nwankwo’s parents were Nigerian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1980s “in pursuit of the American dream,” she said. Her father was a petroleum engineer who worked for Mobil in Nigeria.
“He and my mother saw the opportunity to obtain degrees from U.S. institutions as invaluable,” said Nwankwo, who was born in Oklahoma.
While her parents obtained their advanced degrees, they graduated during the oil bust of the 1980s when there were no engineering jobs available.
“My father made ends meet doing pharmaceutical deliveries, working grueling hours from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., while my mother worked in state drug rehabilitation programs as a psychotherapist — incredibly difficult but fulfilling work,” she said. “Their resilience paid off when I was 13 and my mother started her own counseling agency, allowing my father to join her as CFO.”
“They came here with nothing and built a legacy — a true American dream story,” she said.
Nwankwo said her parents are her life heroes who sacrificed so much.
“In true Nigerian fashion, my mother always presented only three acceptable career paths: doctor, lawyer or engineer,” she said. “My father, however, encouraged me to dream more expansively. Because he loved business, I initially followed that path, double majoring in economics and marketing.”
Nwankwo took a college business law course during her sophomore year.
“I thought I would love it, but I actually found it dry and uninspiring,” she said. “I crossed law school off the list until my senior year.”
That’s when Nwankwo reconnected with a high school friend.
“She explained how the law wasn’t just about contracts and money, but a tool to solve complex problems — ranging from politics to business to human rights,” she said. “That perspective shifted things for me. That conversation prompted me to study for the LSAT, and here we are.”
After graduating from SMU Dedman School of Law in 2012, Nwankwo practiced labor and employment litigation at Kane Russell Coleman Logan, Littler Mendelson and Jones Day.
In 2020, she made the move to go in-house to Atlanta-based Change Healthcare, where she served as senior employment counsel.
“In litigation, most interactions outside my team were in inherently oppositional contexts — depositions, contested hearings, arbitrations,” she said. “I realized I wanted a role where I could build relationships with the people I advise and work alongside them as a strategic partner toward shared goals.
I wanted to focus more on advice and counsel–helping companies navigate new issues like the pandemic response and also to prevent issues before they spiraled into unnecessary litigation.”
Change Healthcare, according to Nwankwo, offered her an “amazing opportunity” where she “learned to translate my litigation skills and issue spotting into practical, proactive business advice, and how to be an in-house lawyer.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Nwankwo turned her focus on the tech industry, which already employed her husband.
“I saw it as an exciting hub of innovation where products are built from scratch to solve real problems,” she said. “Dropbox specifically resonated with me because of their mission to design a more enlightened way of working. One of our core values is to ‘Make Work Human.’ This aligns with my personal and professional belief that the workplace should be intentional, humane and kind. I also really love our Virtual First model, which believes that a thriving workplace can happen even through remote work.”
Brown, the Fisher Phillips partner, said Nwankwo “aims to reshape how a global technology company navigates employment law, people strategy and organizational change.”
“Over the past year, Victoria has served as the architect and strategic stabilizer for some of the company’s most complex and high-risk initiatives — delivering both legal excellence and business value,” Brown said, noting Nwankwo’s leadership during the October 2024 restructuring at Dropbox. “Her leadership during the company’s largest multi-country workforce transformation was singular. Reductions-in-force are never easy — they are painful for those impacted and difficult for those managing the process. Knowing the business viewed this as a true last resort, she focused on separating the emotion of the moment from the legal obligations at hand, ensuring that the company acted with clarity and care at every step.”
Last year, Nwankwo noticed Dropbox leaders were “repeatedly answering the same employment-related questions partly due to turnover in our client groups.” So, she compiled the answers into a comprehensive guide called “Working with Employment Counsel,” which defined roles, explained approaches to risk assessment, outlined how to collaborate effectively with the legal department and answered frequently asked questions.
“To make this resource even more accessible, I created a custom GPT trained solely on this content that our HR partners can interact with directly,” Nwankwo said. “This allows them to get immediate answers to routine questions which enables the teams to move faster, and also preserves our time for complex, strategic matters that require nuanced legal judgment. The feedback has been enthusiastic — it’s improved our partnership and allowed us to be more proactive rather than purely reactive.”
Nwankwo said her best day came last year when she was awarded the Dropbox “Be Embedded” award, which recognizes a team member who “demonstrates exemplary client relationships and is deeply integrated into the business.”
“It reinforced that my approach to client partnership was resonating, which is ultimately my favorite part of being in-house,” she said.
Nwankwo also successfully resolved multiple prelitigation employment-related claims involving disabilities, alleged retaliation, international sick leave, workplace misconduct, complex executive exits and confidential settlement negotiations.
Carrington Coleman Partner Jennifer Ryback worked with Nwankwo on a potential litigation matter in 2025.
“The matter was complicated for a number of reasons, not the least of which was an aggressive opposing counsel and a very complicated fact pattern that was very sensitive to the business unit,” Ryback said. “But as we navigated the matter together, I was impressed by how perceptive Vicky was. At every turn, she picked up on verbal and nonverbal cues from our opponent. She had great instincts about how certain settlement offers might be received and the timing of when we should communicate with our opponent. And largely because of this, we were able to settle the matter in a very favorable way for our client.”
Ryback said she and Nwankwo were young lawyers together in the same DAYL Leadership Class. Together, they helped start the DAYL Charity Ball, now the DAYL Bolton Ball.
“While the whole class was attributed credit for starting the event that has now lasted over a decade and grown in size and scale — consistently raising over $50K annually to support the DAYL Foundation — Vicky was at the center of the planning that first year,” she said. “She consistently contributed by bringing in sponsorship dollars, auction items and staying in the details of planning for the event. I doubt she would give herself as much credit for the success of the event, but I can confidently say that the event would not have happened that first year without her contributions.”
Citi’s Riley said Nwankwo is extraordinary in how she “balances it all.”
“The thriving career that requires her undivided attention all while working remotely and still trying to build bridges across time zones, alongside being a mother to two adorable children, a wife, household manager, active philanthropist and community advocate, and civic leader — Victoria makes it appear easy,” Riley said. “But I know as a woman, it’s never easy to handle all of which I’m sure she must juggle to show up and be present in every aspect of her life.”
Fun Facts: Victoria Nwankwo
- Favorite book: The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez, which is a beautiful story that provides insights on the immigrant perspective.
- Favorite music group: I love Sara Bareilles’ music and projects.
- Favorite movie: Sister Act 2. It is so nostalgic for me!
- Favorite restaurant: Eddie V’s. I’ll eat anything there, but especially the bananas Foster.
- Favorite beverage: Chai latte with extra cinnamon.
- Favorite vacation ever: Bali, Indonesia, for our honeymoon.Hero in life: My parents. They sacrificed so much to give us everything that we have. I understand that depth of love and sacrifice more and more now that I am a parent myself.