Backing Nigeria’s creative ambition: Eniola Leyimu joins Greychapel Legal as partner

Helping creators and founders turn valuable ideas and rights into growing businesses is a key opportunity that talented Nigerian lawyer Eniola Leyimu sees for his new role as a partner at Greychapel Legal, where he will look to combine his creative sector knowledge with the Nigerian firm’s established capabilities in corporate transactions and finance.

“What excites me most is the opportunity to build this within a strong corporate, commercial and transactional platform,” shared Leyimu after his arrival was announced this week. His legal education and career has spanned the UK, USA, and Nigeria.

“At Greychapel, I’ll focus on helping creators, founders, investors, and businesses structure transactions, raise capital, protect and commercialise valuable assets, navigate regulation, and scale.”

The firm's principal partner Oladele Oladunjoye said Leyimu’s appointment strengthens an area in which the firm sees significant opportunity, building on its existing expertise “with a more focused offering for clients across the creative and digital economy”.

Leyimu brings experience on different sides of that equation: commercialising content and brands, advising creative businesses, and supporting the investments and transactions underpinning business growth.

At Discovery Communications in London, he progressed from paralegal to Legal Manager, advising on the international commercialisation of programming and intellectual property. More than three years at Olajide Oyewole LLP in Lagos followed, working with creative and technology-sector clients on corporate and intellectual property matters.

His subsequent US roles broadened that grounding.

At Golden West Food Group, he supported commercial contracting and the owners’ family office investments across start-ups, funds and real estate. At Los Angeles law firm Gipson Hoffman & Pancione, he worked as a Corporate Legal Specialist supporting matters including acquisitions, private capital and financing transactions.

Leyimu's transaction experience includes advising a lender on financing a slate of motion pictures, an artist’s estate on licensing and commercialising a music publishing catalogue, and a promoter on the structure, commercial framework and intellectual property strategy for an alternative football competition.

An LSE law graduate with an LLM in Media, Entertainment and Technology Law and Policy from UCLA, Leyimu established EL Law Practice in Lagos earlier this year, advising founders, investors and creative businesses, before joining Greychapel recently.

He described the move as “an exciting next chapter and a natural continuation of my work across the creative economy, technology, transactions and finance” — bringing those strands together in his leadership of the firm’s METS practice.