N.A. Were Advocates & Consultancy
1. Snapshot
Client: N.A. Were Advocates & Consultancy
Founder: Nerima Were, Principal Advocate
Industry: Legal Services / Gender Justice and Feminist Consulting / Professional Services
Geography: Kenya, East Africa
Business age at engagement: Pre-launch – registering at time of engagement
Team size at engagement: 1 (founder only)
Engagement date: January – August 2026
Growth stage: 01 – Strategic Direction / 03 – Build
Entry point: Diagnose, Architect and Execute
What they came asking for: Domain, email setup, a logo, a letterhead, and a website
Pattern: The founder’s instinct about the brand was right about the feeling and wrong about the form
2. Executive Summary
Nerima Were is a feminist litigator and human rights lawyer with almost a decade of embedded practice across movements, civil society organisations, and pan-African human rights institutions. When she established N.A. Were Advocates & Consultancy, she arrived with a founding philosophy, a documented practice framework, and a fully formed brand vision: a warrior woman, a sword, and a slogan – “The law is our sword.”
She was not wrong about any of it. The warrior energy is real, it is earned, and it is present in every case the firm has taken and every movement it has partnered with.
What the engagement found was not a bad instinct. It was an instinct expressed in the wrong form — placed at the corporate mark level, where it would be encountered by strangers without Nerima’s voice in the room to explain it, before those strangers had decided whether to trust the firm at all.
The engagement also found something the brief had not surfaced: a commercial and property law practice that was always part of the founding plan and had not made it into the brand. A warrior woman logo cannot hold a conveyancing mandate. If it had been commissioned and built, the firm would have launched with a brand that excluded one of its two practices from day one.
Without this engagement, Nerima would have built a brand that expressed everything she believed and constrained everything she needed the firm to become.
3. The Situation They Recognised
Nerima had done the work most lawyers read about in law school and file away.
Strategic litigation before the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Kenya. Movement lawyering with collectives across East Africa. Constitutional petitions on the right to health, reproductive justice, and access to information. Knowledge production with pan-African feminist research partners. Leadership within the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa.
She left an established institution to do this work under her own name, with full control over which cases to take, which movements to partner with, and how the firm would operate in the world.
She arrived at the engagement knowing precisely what she stood for. The brief she brought reflected that. The email domain was urgent – she needed it to process the firm’s registration. The logo needed to carry the weight of the practice. The website needed to feel different from every other law firm’s website because she was building something different from every other law firm.
The warrior woman was not arbitrary. It was the visual translation of something she had been living and building for a decade. The sword was not aggressive for the sake of it. It was the honest image of what she had been doing in courtrooms and movement spaces – using the law as a tool, wielding it with intention.
What she had not yet seen was how that image would land in the hands of people who did not already know her.
4. The Moment Of Risk
Fourteen days after first contact, Nerima wrote:
“I have landed on a slogan and the primary imagery for the logo. ‘The law is our Sword.’ I have attached an image that I want us to draw inspo from.”
The designer briefing was imminent. The warrior woman logo was about to be commissioned, built, and placed at the centre of every first impression the firm would make.
The risk was not that the logo would be poorly made. The risk was that it would be well made and still not work – because it was designed for an audience that already understood Nerima, not for the strangers who would encounter the firm without her voice in the room.
A development funder reviewing proposals for strategic litigation partnerships. An institutional body evaluating a new practice for a formal collaboration. A property buyer who has been referred to a lawyer and lands on the firm’s website. A corporate client seeking legal counsel for a company restructure.
None of these people arrive having read the founding concept note. None of them know that the warrior woman is how Nerima feels when she is in a courtroom, in a movement convening, navigating a hostile legal environment with a client who has been failed by every other system. They see a mark on a letterhead. They make a decision in seconds.
A warrior with a sword communicates confrontation before it communicates competence. For audiences who arrive wary – and many of the people N.A. Were Advocates most needs to reach arrive wary, having been failed by exactly the institutions the firm is trying to hold accountable – that is the wrong first signal.
There was a second risk, quieter but more consequential. The brief had been built entirely around the movement practice. The commercial and property arm – conveyancing, corporate advisory, company incorporations – was present in the founding plan but absent from the brief. A logo designed for movement lawyering cannot credibly introduce itself to a property buyer or a corporate client. The firm was preparing to launch with a brand that already excluded one of its own practices.
The build was about to begin. The full shape of the firm had not yet been examined.
5. What We Found
Finding 01 — The founder’s instinct was right about the feeling and wrong about the form
Nerima wanted a brand that did not look like every other law firm because she is not building every other law firm. That instinct is correct and worth protecting. The mistake was not the instinct. It was the decision to place it at the corporate mark level.
A corporate mark is the first thing a stranger sees. It operates before any copy is read, before any case is reviewed, before any conversation happens. When it carries a complete worldview – confrontation, resistance, combat – it asks the stranger to interpret that worldview before they have decided to engage. Some strangers can. Many cannot. And the ones who cannot are not necessarily the wrong clients. They are often exactly the right clients, arriving with exactly the right problem, stopped at the door by a signal they did not know how to read.
The warrior energy was not lost when it left the logo. It was moved to where it could do more work: in the copy, the cases, the publications, the movement partnerships, the language of every page. That is where it lands most powerfully – in specificity, in evidence, in Nerima’s voice – not in a symbol that asks strangers to bring their own interpretation.
Finding 02 — The brief arrived before the business model was finished
The warrior woman brief was written from the inside of Nerima’s movement identity. It was coherent with one half of the firm she was building. It did not reflect the other half.
The commercial and property practice – designed to give the firm structural independence from any single funding source, ensuring advocacy work is never contingent on any single external funder – was present in Nerima’s thinking. It had not made it into the brief. The brief was premature: written before the full shape of the firm had been confirmed on paper, from the conviction that was most vivid rather than from the complete model.
A conventional agency takes the brief and builds to it. The diagnostic move is to recognise when a brief has been written before the business model is finished – and to surface the complete model before the build commits to a direction it cannot later accommodate.
If the warrior woman logo had been commissioned before this was surfaced, the commercial practice would have launched under a brand built for a different firm entirely.
Finding 03 — The gap between internal legibility and external legibility was the real constraint
Inside Nerima’s network – the movements, the civil society organisations, the feminist legal practitioners, the pan-African human rights community – the warrior woman is legible. They know the work. They know the founder. They would have read the logo immediately and correctly.
Outside that network, the firm is a new practice. It has no prior relationship with the institutional body that receives its letterhead, the property buyer who follows a referral, the development funder encountering it in a proposal stack. For all of them, the brand is doing the work alone.
That gap – between how a founder reads their own brand and how a stranger reads it – is not a failure of imagination. It is a structural condition of building something new. The diagnostic work named it clearly enough that Nerima could see it from the outside and make a different decision.
6. What Changed
What decision became possible that was not possible before?
Nerima could see the firm from the outside – and choose what she wanted strangers to see first.
Specific decisions that became possible:
Nerima chose a restrained, name-centred wordmark – N.A. Were Advocates – with a teal palette that holds both the gravity of the legal practice and the forward-facing character of the movement work. She arrived at this decision through multiple sessions, four logo concepts including warrior variants, consultation with colleagues, and weeks of sitting with the options. She did not accept a recommendation. She made a choice, with full understanding of what she was choosing and what she was redirecting.
The dual-engine model was formally named and built into the brand architecture from the start. The commercial and property practice launched alongside the movement practice under one mark that holds both without contradiction. Neither practice is asked to explain the other.
The warrior energy was redirected into the content. The track record entries, the practice area copy, the Knowledge Hub publications, the movement infrastructure section – these carry the intensity that a logo cannot sustain alone. A visitor reading the strategic litigation page feels the weight of the work. A visitor reading the Knowledge Hub finds the intellectual rigour behind it. The warrior is present throughout. She just speaks in specifics.
The website at nwadvocates.com was built with a clear dual-entry architecture. Movement partners and development funders land in one space. Commercial and property clients land in another. Neither audience is asked to navigate through the other’s language to find what they need.
What was not possible before the engagement:
Launching the commercial practice under a brand that could hold it without contradiction. Briefing a developer from a confirmed architecture rather than an assumed one. Building a site with two distinct audience entry points that do not compete with each other. Expressing the founding conviction through the work — where it has specificity, evidence, and force — rather than through a symbol that depends on prior context to be legible.
7. The Result
Commercial:
N.A. Were Advocates & Consultancy launched with a brand that institutional audiences, development funders, movement partners, and commercial clients can engage with on first encounter. The commercial and property practice is operational. Cases are before the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Kenya. The firm’s structural independence – from any single funder, partner, or revenue stream – is built into the model from day one.
Operational:
The firm has a brand system with a coherent structure across all touchpoints: wordmark, colour palette, typography, letterhead, PowerPoint theme, website, email signature, and digital business card. A second team member has joined. The site has been expanded to a team section without structural change. The Knowledge Hub is built and ready for publications as the research programme grows.
Confidence:
Nerima arrived with a fully formed vision and left with a different one – one she arrived at through examination rather than instruction. The warrior energy is not gone. She knows exactly where it belongs and why it is more powerful there than at the corporate mark level. The distinction between where conviction lives in a brand system and what the corporate mark needs to do was the thing the engagement produced that no deliverable alone could capture.
8. What This Prevented
A brand that expressed everything Nerima believed and constrained everything the firm needed to become.
The warrior woman logo would have been a precise translation of Nerima’s identity into a mark. It would also have been a brand that asked every institutional body, every development funder, every new commercial client, and every first-time visitor to interpret confrontation before they had decided to engage. Not because those audiences cannot handle confrontation – many of them live inside it – but because they encounter the mark before they encounter the work, and the mark would have been doing the wrong job first.
A commercial practice launched under a brand built for a different firm.
The conveyancing and corporate advisory arm was always part of the plan. A warrior woman logo built for movement lawyering would have required either a rebrand at commercial launch – expensive, disruptive, reputation-disrupting for a practice still establishing itself – or the permanent accommodation of a visual contradiction. The firm launched with both practices under one mark because the examination happened before the logo was commissioned.
A build committed to assumptions that had not been confirmed.
Once a logo is commissioned, a site is built, and a letterhead is printed, the cost of correction rises steeply. The brief arrived before the business model was fully on paper. The diagnostic work surfaced that gap before any build commitment was made. Nerima did not inherit a brand she would need to undo.
The founding conviction reduced to a symbol rather than expressed through evidence.
A warrior woman icon on a website page would have signalled intent. The track record entries, the publications, the constitutional petitions before the Supreme Court, the movement infrastructure section, the Knowledge Hub – these demonstrate it. Intent signals are easier to make and harder to trust. Evidence is harder to produce and harder to dismiss. The case study on the site is the warrior, expressed in a form strangers can evaluate.
9. Where They Are Now
N.A. Were Advocates & Consultancy is live at nwadvocates.com.
The movement practice is active. The commercial practice is operational. The Knowledge Hub is built. A second team member has joined. The firm’s pan-African partnerships are active and growing.
The positioning of the firm has not yet been formally examined. The dual-engine model is live, but the language that would make each audience feel immediately understood – that would tell a development funder in the first paragraph why N.A. Were Advocates approaches strategic litigation differently from other feminist legal practices, and tell a corporate client in the first paragraph why this firm’s commercial advisory is worth choosing over a larger practice – is still being developed through the work rather than through a structured positioning process. That work remains ahead.
QALLANN NOTE
The founding instinct was right. That matters.
Nerima did not want a conventional law firm brand because she is not building a conventional law firm. The diagnostic work did not soften that conviction or produce something generic in its place. The N.A. Were Advocates site is not safe. It is specific, deliberate, and built around a practice that takes on constitutional litigation and property conveyancing with the same stated commitment to precision and partnership. The warrior survived the engagement. She just moved.
The pattern here – a founder whose instinct about the feeling of the brand is correct and whose instinct about the form is wrong – appears across sectors and stages. It is particularly common in impact sector practices, where the founding conviction is often the most vivid thing about the organisation and the most natural place to anchor the brand. The diagnostic work is not about moderating that conviction. It is about finding the form that gives it the most force with the widest range of relevant strangers.
What this engagement did not resolve: the firm’s positioning has not been examined. Both audiences – movement partners and commercial clients – encounter a brand that is coherent and credible. Neither yet encounters language specifically calibrated to how they think about their own problem before they know they need a lawyer. The gap between a brand that holds and a positioning that converts is the next frontier. The foundation is confirmed. The translation work is still ahead.