Daniel Okafor

Daniel's story

Daniel was born in Houston to Nigerian parents who ran a small pharmacy on Bissonnet Street. He worked the register from the age of eleven and watched his father negotiate with suppliers in three languages. He says that is where he learned that the quiet person in the room is usually the one who has already decided what they want.

He studied history at Rice and went to law school at the University of Chicago on a scholarship. Instead of joining a firm, he spent six years at the Cook County Public Defender's office, trying more than sixty cases to verdict. He describes those years as the best training a litigator can get and the hardest thing he has ever done.

The case he still talks about is a 2015 wrongful-termination suit for a warehouse supervisor who had reported safety violations and was fired two weeks later. Daniel found the internal email that proved the timeline, and the jury took under two hours. He joined Hale & Mercer in 2016 and has led the litigation group since 2021.

Daniel lives in Hyde Park with his wife Adaeze, a paediatric nurse, and their three children. He coaches his son's under-12 football team at Jackson Park and has been known to use the whiteboard in the firm's conference room to diagram set pieces.