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Growing up in Memphis as one of six kids, Victoria Nwozuzu always had a desire to stand out and do something different than her siblings. She found the law to be that unique path.
“In fourth grade I started really getting into John Grisham books, and it was important for me because he’s also from the South, [growing up near] Memphis, and writes a lot about that, and I found it intriguing,” she recounts. “I started thinking about the skills I had in writing, researching, things like that, and my interest in law grew from there. I also had a great history teacher who also taught government and law. He really pushed me and encouraged me to pursue law as a career.”
Leaving everyone she knew, Nwozuzu and her father loaded up a car and drove from Memphis all the way to New Haven so she could attend Yale, where she earned her bachelor’s in political science. She then completed her law degree at Harvard, though she didn’t make the jump right away.
“When I graduated from college, I realized I didn’t really know any lawyers and hadn’t done any real legal work,” Nwozuzu explains. “I ended up taking a couple years off between college and law school. I worked for some private practitioners just to get to know more about their day-to-day practice.”
In her second year, she interned with the Illinois state government performing legislative research.
“Lawmakers would give us requests for laws they wanted to propose, and they wanted to know the history and what other states did,” she recounts. “That helped me hone some of the skills needed to go to law school and get a taste of the different issues lawyers address.”
Upon graduating, Nwozuzu spent a decade working for firms Lawrence & Bundy and King & Spalding, where she had the opportunity to perform a variety of legal work, including representing local school districts in litigation and defending pharmaceutical and medical device companies against mass tort claims. Toward the end of that period, she completed a secondment with Dow Chemical Company.
“That taught me a lot about in-house lawyers—how they have to balance the business with their legal work, how they’re involved in shaping direction for the company and how they give input to business leaders,” she describes. “That experience got me interested in going in-house.”
In 2022, Nwozuzu was offered a role at Lyft in the litigation department, and she was intrigued. “With Lyft, it was very interesting because there’s still a lot of legal uncertainty in the rideshare framework,” Nwozuzu notes. “Coming here gives you a lot of opportunity for innovation and to shape how the law looks in this industry.”
Today, she holds the role of senior litigation counsel at the company. In that capacity, Nwozuzu handles cases internally that are not filed in litigation and aims to resolve them without judicial intervention; she also manages a larger group of matters that are filed in court, and her role involves communicating and strategizing with outside counsel and cross-functional teams at the company.
“I work a lot with our safety team,” Nwozuzu shares. “My work is really focused on intentional tort litigation and safety on the platform. I communicate about how issues we’re seeing in litigation affect the company overall and how we can strengthen safety on the platform. Sometimes it involves preparing for hearings or mediations, working with employees for depositions or with finance and executive leadership. It really varies depending on where in the life cycle of litigation we are.”
One of her most notable wins involved achieving summary judgment in a case filed in Ohio. That case entailed partnering with engineers, as well as the safety and fraud teams, to delve into different technological aspects, Nwozuzu explains. “It also involved working with new outside counsel in Ohio who didn’t know Lyft as well, so I had to get them up to speed on our business model, features, and support systems. It was really a collaborative effort and set the stage for how we conduct [future] discovery. Now people come to me as a subject-matter expert. It brings more work, but it’s also nice to be trusted.”
That collaborative, business-minded approach is exactly what sets Nwozuzu apart, according to outside counsel who have worked closely with her. “Victoria is the whole package: a talented lawyer; a leader who truly understands the business and makes the right strategic decisions; and an absolute gem of a person to work with. It has been a pleasure for the GT team to collaborate with Victoria to set precedents in the rideshare industry. Lyft and the industry benefits as a whole from Victoria’s leadership,” say Jacob Bundick and James E. Gillenwater, litigation shareholders at Greenberg Traurig.
One of the things that has always been important to Nwozuzu is helping others. For instance, in high school, she was part of a program called Memphis Challenge, which is a nonprofit organization that helps students build leadership and professional skills and obtain internships.
“I had a lot of internships with nonprofits, and being one of six kids, children have always been important to me,” she shares. “In law school I focused on family law and did a clinic researching health outcomes for kids in the Mississippi Delta. In practice, I served as a guardian ad litem for kids and continued that in DC. It’s nice to connect with people going through hard times and know you’re making a meaningful impact.”
She also enjoys helping aspiring lawyers and advises young attorneys to keep a good work/life balance.
“My family keeps me humble, and if I start talking too much like a lawyer, they snap me out of it,” Nwozuzu says, “You don’t have to have everything figured out at the beginning. When I graduated college, I didn’t know what I wanted to practice. It’s okay to make changes when the time feels right, as long as you’re continuing to grow.”
