By the time Blessing Udo LL.M. ’25 arrived at Harvard Law School, she already had been a practicing lawyer in her native Nigeria for several years on a range of complex issues.
Among other engagements, she acted as production counsel on behalf of a Nigerian film studio for Amazon Prime’s first African Amazon original movie, “Gangs of Lagos,” and other films, including “Brotherhood,” “Ada Omo Daddy,” and “Christmas in Lagos.” She also regularly advised clients — including Samsung and the TikTok platform SoundOn — about her country’s data privacy laws, including the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, which she contributed to the review of the bill.
Her legal practice was varied — she began her career with a focus on intellectual property law and then became interested in data privacy and artificial intelligence issues — but she wanted to pursue other options too. An LL.M. at Harvard Law School provided the perfect opportunity.
“It felt like a great time to see if there are any other aspects of the law I want to explore,” she said.
Udo chose Harvard Law in part because of the flexibility it offered in its curriculum and she took courses on subjects ranging from digital governance and technology policy to negotiation and venture capital.
After graduating, Udo hopes to continue working in private practice. She has a particular interest in mergers and acquisitions. Her favorite Harvard Law course was the Transactional Law Workshop – Mergers and Acquisitions, in which students alternated between representing the buyer — in this case, a private equity firm — and the seller, a telecommunications company, in a nearly $8 billion acquisition. The class ended with a dinner to celebrate the simulated deal.
“The M&A workshop sharpened my structural thinking around deal architecture — how fiduciary duties, antitrust concerns, and closing mechanics intersect,” she said.
Udo, who grew up in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, earned her LL.B. in law at the University of Uyo before studying at Nigerian Law School. She practiced at two firms, including Jackson, Etti & Edu, before making her first trip to the United States to begin her Harvard studies.
“HLS pushed me beyond technical mastery and deepened my understanding of what it means to be a thoughtful, strategic lawyer in a global context.”
In addition to the M&A workshop, taught by David Sorkin ’84, Barry and Teri Volpert Visiting Professor of Practice in Private Equity, and Alan Klein ’84, Douglas and Samara Braunstein Visiting Professor of Law, she sought out other experiential opportunities. Over the winter term, she took a negotiation class in which she represented a fictional alumni association in negotiations with university administrators and student protesters stemming from a controversial award decision.
“I learned to move away from positional bargaining and embrace negotiation as a process of mutual understanding — one that involves asking open-ended questions with genuine curiosity, listening actively, building good rapport, and working together to problem solve,” she said. “The workshop helped me see how fair outcomes are shaped not just by what is said, but by how process, emotion, and trust are managed throughout the negotiation.”
She also was a research assistant for Visiting Professor John Palfrey ’01. For his forthcoming book, she summarized U.S. and international cases at the intersection of technology and the public interest, including a case brought by a mother whose daughter died after participating in a challenge promoted to her in a TikTok video.
Through the Cyberlaw Clinic, she conducted a data protection impact assessment and drafted a privacy policy for Post Road Foundation, which seeks to expand high-speed internet access in rural and urban communities. She also took part in the Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Project, a pro-bono organization that provides legal research to aspiring entrepreneurs from the Harvard and MIT communities.
For her LL.M. paper, “The Agentic AI Paradigm: Reconceptualizing AI Liability Frameworks in the Era of Autonomous Systems,” she examined whether existing liability frameworks, “rooted in foreseeability, proximate cause, and human-centered agency, can withstand the rising presence of AI entities that operate independently and, at times, err in unpredictable ways.” In her paper, she proposes “a severity-tiered and differential apportionment structure” in addressing AI liability.
Outside class, Udo was involved in several student organizations, including the Harvard Business Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Harvard Women’s Law Association, the Harvard Black Law Students Association, and First Class, which supports first-generation, low-income, and working-class students. As a member of the HLS student government, she served on the International Committee, organizing events that spotlighted the perspective of students from other countries.
She was co-chair of the Africa Development Conference, an annual event that brings together voices from across Africa and the diaspora to explore solutions to the continent’s most pressing challenges. “We organized not just a conference, but reignited a shared conviction in the power of our collective will,” said Udo. “It reaffirmed my belief in Africa’s enduring ingenuity and its capacity to drive global transformation.”
“At HLS, the student organizations are run as if to meet a global international standard,” she said. “It’s how you would see top executives and C-suite executives running their organizations. From the outset, you are set up to be a leader.”
Udo also found time to enjoy the Boston area and beyond. She tried ice skating, got a game puck at her first Harvard hockey game, picnicked on Boston Common, and made quick trips to Miami and Washington, D.C. (the latter trip with the Women’s Law Association).
“It’s been a very profound year,” she said. “HLS pushed me beyond technical mastery and deepened my understanding of what it means to be a thoughtful, strategic lawyer in a global context. I came in wired to seek out opportunity — but HLS taught me that sometimes it’s not enough to seek; you must shape the path or create the opportunity.”
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