Dr. Chijioke Okorie is a Lecturer in the Department of Private Law at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Prior to that, she was the inaugural postdoctoral research fellow under the South African Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development at UCT (2019 and 2020).

Before becoming a full time researcher and policy consultant, she was a Senior Associate in the law firm of CLP Legal (formerly, Consolex Legal Practitioners). She is also the Lead Advisor at Penguide Advisory, a firm that provides research, educational, legal and regulatory advisory services in various fields including intellectual property and (emerging) technologies. At Penguide, she has the responsibility of leading research, training and legal advisory services for a range of clients including government and government agencies, companies and non-profit organisations, entrepreneurs within Nigeria, across Africa and internationally.

Additional positions/roles include:

• Contributor for Africa, Intellectual Property Forum
• ‘Africa Correspondent’ at award-winning IP blog The IPKat
• Founder/Leader, Data Science Law Lab

Chijioke holds a PhD in IP Law from the University of Cape Town, an LLM in Internet Law and Policy from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and an LLB from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria. She was called as an advocate and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in 2006.

Chijioke is a member of various academic associations such as the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP), the South African Association of Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology Law Teachers and Researchers (AIPLITL) and the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL).

 Her monograph – Multi-sided music platforms and the law: Copyright, Law and Policy in Africa (Routledge, 2020) – explores how South Africa and Nigeria can apply copyright, competition, and data protection laws to digital platforms that use copyright-protected music content in digital advertising.

Chijioke has participated in various funded international research projects including her collaboration on Multi-territorial digital copyright licensing within the AfCFTA for the Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR) project.