Debo Nwauzu is a non-practising solicitor and the founder and Chair of Totally Management Ltd, owners of BLD. She is also, and has been since 1986, a barrister and a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. In addition, Debo is the Editorial Director and publisher of BLD’s annual ground-breaking Black Letter Law publication.

After graduating in 1985, Debo went to Nigeria, her ancestral home, where she attended the Nigerian Law School and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1986. She served her National Service in northern Nigeria in a Law Chambers doing predominantly general civil litigation work. It was during this time in northern Nigeria that she founded a National Service Legal Aid Clinic with a few other like-minded young lawyers. They visited prisons and represented prisoners on remand (some there for several years) for whom there was no Legal Aid and for whom the costs of employing the services of lawyers was beyond reach.

With plenty of passion, but limited knowledge and zero experience of Criminal Law, Debo took on some of the cases of the prisoners on remand. The most memorable of these cases, permanently etched in her mind, was that of a young, bearded, softly-spoken man charged with murder, who had been on remand for more than six years. He was released after she successfully submitted a "no case to answer” plea to the court. This experience was to later change her ambition to do commercial work.

Debo later returned to England and was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1989. She disbarred (as was necessary at that time in England and Wales) to re-qualify to become a solicitor in 1992. She worked for several firms, but her passion remained the underprivileged and she therefore made the commitment then to do Legal Aid work - in the days before Legal Aid work became bogged down in mountains of paperwork and crippling regulations.  She ran her own law firm until 2001 and had a very short stint lecturing at the College of Law, becoming an IATC (Inns Advocacy Training Committee) accredited advocacy trainer.

From 2003 Debo became a consultant, managing and advising other firms about accreditation, systems and quality standards. Until late 2006 when BLD became totally consuming, she created, developed, designed and delivered training courses for businesses, both one-to-one and groups. She was an elected school governor and committed volunteer to a number of charities.

 In 2009, The Lawyer magazine named Debo as one of its Hot 100 lawyers of 2008. In 2011 she joined the panel of judges, chaired by Cherie Booth QC, for the Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Awards.