About Ria
Ria N. Mankee-Sookram is an Attorney-at-Law, Family Business Advisor, and Family Wealth Advisor based in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. She advises families, founders, and closely held businesses across the Caribbean and its diaspora — including the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada — on succession planning, family business governance, trusts and estates, asset protection, and dispute resolution.
Her work sits at the intersection of two disciplines usually kept apart: the legal architecture of succession and asset protection, and the human, relational work of preparing a family or founder-led business to actually survive the transition. She has spent over 15 years advising family enterprises, trusts, and next-generation leaders throughout the region and its diaspora.
Ria created the LEGACY EcosystemTM comprising the LEGACY Matrix, the LEGACY DNA and Seven Domains framework — proprietary methodologies for guiding family enterprises through succession, governance, and multigenerational transition — published in her book, The Seven Domains of the Family Business: The Journey to a Multigenerational Legacy. She also lectures law at a tertiary level institution.
Attorney-at-Law · Family Business Advisor · Family Wealth Advisor · Certified Mediator · Arbitrator · Trust and Estate Practitioner · Insolvency Trustee · Author
A Family Wealth Advisor Who Works Across Generations
Most of the families Ria advises are not looking for a purely technical opinion. What they need is a family business & family wealth advisor who can hold the legal, financial, and relational sides of a succession together at once, while understanding the particular pressures facing Caribbean and diaspora families: multiple jurisdictions, informal ownership arrangements, and generations who don’t always agree on what “the family business” is for. That is the gap Ria fills, working with founders and next-generation leaders to turn governance and ownership decisions into plans a family can actually live with long after the documents are signed. It is a slower, more careful way to practice law, but it is the only way that actually works for families trying to build something that outlasts any one owner.
Her approach draws on the LEGACY Matrix, the LEGACY DNA and Seven Domains frameworks she developed, teaches, and writes about, distilled here into practical guidance rather than the fuller methodology she reserves for clients who engage her directly. If you are trying to work out where your own family stands, How I Help outlines the two main ways she works with families and founders, and Insights goes deeper into the thinking behind her frameworks.
Her interest in succession did not start in a law office. Growing up around family enterprises in Trinidad and Tobago, she saw how quickly a business built over decades can unravel once ownership passes to the next generation without a plan. That experience still shapes how she works today: less interested in generic templates, more interested in helping each family have the specific, sometimes uncomfortable conversations that determine whether a business, and a family, stays together. It’s also why she continues to write, teach, and speak on these topics well beyond the courtroom.
Credentials
- BSc. in Mathematics and Chemistry
- LLB
- LEC
- MCIArb — Member, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators
- TEP — Trust and Estate Practitioner (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners)
- ACFWA — Family Wealth Advising credential
- CFBA — Family Business Advising credential
- Negotiation & Leadership (Harvard Law School)
- MBA — Artificial Intelligence
Professional Associations
- Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago
- Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (TT Chapter) — Immediate Past Vice Chair
- Mediation Board of Trinidad and Tobago
- Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (UK)
- Family Firm Institute (US)
- Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Commerce
- Caribbean Corporate Governance Institute
- Family Business Association of the Caribbean — Chair
- Guyana Bar Association
Everyday I see what happens when families avoid hard conversations, and what’s possible when they don’t. Legacy isn’t just what you leave behind, it’s what you decide, on purpose, while you’re still here to shape it.