Conway Ekpo is an Executive Director in the legal department of Morgan Stanley and is also an adjunct law professor. Prior to transitioning in-house, Conway practiced financial services litigation as a BigLaw associate for nearly a decade.
In his current role, Conway is responsible for advising Morgan Stanley’s wealth management business, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, as well as Morgan Stanley’s Private Bank. His solutions-oriented approach helps the firm to service the many high net worth individuals, corporations and governments who have invested over $2.4 trillion of their assets under the firm’s management.
A firm believer in pipeline initiatives, Conway co-founded the Black BigLaw Pipeline, Inc. which provides substantive and soft skills training and support to black law students and junior associates at large law firms. He sits on the board for Legal Outreach and also serves on the National and Northeast advisory boards for the National Black Law Students Association. He is a frequent speaker and writer in the diversity and inclusion space and was featured as the 2018 keynote speaker at Harvard Law School for the 14th annual National Black Pre-Law Conference.
Conway received the New York City Bar Association’s 2016 Diversity Champion Award in recognition of his effort in founding 1844, which is a group of 60 black male lawyers practicing in BigLaw and in-house legal departments in New York. The group’s name “1844” is in reference to the year that the first black person, Macon Bolling Allen, was admitted to practice law in America. The group’s purpose is to build genuine relationships between its members and leverage those relationships to help them develop personally and professionally and give back to their communities.
Conway is a proud member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge and was also selected as a 2016 Fellow in the Council of Urban Professionals (“CUP”). He earned his B.S. in architectural engineering at the University of Kansas and his J.D. at Rutgers School of Law where he was Managing Editor of the Rutgers Law Review.