A voice for struggling advocates: Effie Sheila Achieng’ and the fight for dignity at the Bar
Effie Sheila Achieng’, who is seeking the position of Nairobi Representative in the upcoming Law Society of Kenya (LSK) elections.
What you need to know:
- Effie Sheila Achieng’ says mental wellness has stood out above all other challenges in the Nairobi branch.
- As convener of the welfare committee, she has witnessed the consequences first-hand: rising cases of depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and advocates cycling in and out of rehabilitation.
In most mornings in Nairobi, as the city stirs and courtrooms begin to wake, Effie Sheila Achieng’s thoughts are with the unseen burdens many advocates carry into practice.
The January scramble for practising fees, the anxiety of months without briefs, and the quiet isolation of a profession that promises prestige but often withholds security. It is this lived reality that has pushed Effie to seek the position of Nairobi Representative in the upcoming Law Society of Kenya (LSK) elections.
“I am seeking this position because the challenges that advocates face are the same challenges I face,” she says simply. “The balance I try to execute daily, between surviving the profession and serving it, is the same balance many young advocates struggle with.”
Prepared to serve
Effie is not new to LSK leadership. She was elected as a council member of the Nairobi Branch in June 2024, where she is serving until the end of her term tis month. During this period, she also convened the welfare committee, placing her at the centre of some of the most pressing—and least spoken about—issues in the legal profession.
Admitted to the bar on November 21, 2021, Effie is now in her fourth year of practice. She runs her firm, which she opened in January 2025. Like many young firm owners, she has resisted early specialisation, choosing instead to practise across several areas of law as she stabilises her firm and builds experience. “When you start your own firm, you do a bit of everything, first to survive, then to grow,” she explains.
Before joining private practice, Effie worked in the insurance sector as an in-house counsel, rising through the ranks to be seconded to work directly under a director. The experience exposed her to high-level litigation, legal audits, and senior counsel engagements, often placing her, as a young advocate, in courtrooms dominated by seasoned legal heavyweights.
“It prepared me,” she says. “Not just professionally, but also emotionally to deal with bias from the bench, power dynamics within the profession, and the quiet intimidation young advocates face.”
Advocates commit suicide
Nairobi is LSK’s largest branch, representing about 73 per cent of advocates in Kenya, she says. Its challenges, Effie says, mirror, and often magnify, those faced across the country. One issue has stood out above all others: mental wellness, she points out.
After Covid-19, she explains, the profession changed. Advocates not only interact and network less but also often suffer alone, she notes. “People no longer have spaces to talk,” she says. “And when challenges pile up with no outlet, they turn inwards.”
As convener of the welfare committee, Effie has witnessed the consequences first-hand: rising cases of depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and advocates cycling in and out of rehabilitation. More painfully, she has seen colleagues lost to suicide. “In the past year alone, we lost two advocates: a woman and a man,” she says. “One of them was someone I had campaigned with. We were close. That reality stays with you.”
She challenges the popular myth that all advocates are financially comfortable, noting that while there is money in law, it takes time to get it. “And many are not prepared for how long and lonely that process can be,” she says. “Comparison worsens the strain. Watching peers appear to succeed while one struggles to find footing, for some, the weight becomes unbearable.”
Men-only safe space
Under her tenure, she says, the Nairobi branch has introduced weekly wellness initiatives, from social forums where advocates simply gather and talk, to professional webinars featuring psychologists and counsellors addressing burnout, work-life balance, and financial stress.
But one initiative stands out as historic. In June 2025, Effie spearheaded the inaugural gentlemen’s mentorship programme; the first fully male-focused mentorship space within the profession. “Men don’t speak easily,” she says. “But when they speak to other men, they open up.”
The sessions revealed something often overlooked: men in the legal profession also experience sexual harassment, but fear reporting because of stigma and expectations of masculinity. Creating a safe, men-only space allowed these stories to surface, leading to broader conversations within the LSK, including a men’s-only session at the society’s annual conference.
Effie is blunt about another unresolved issue: sexual harassment in law firms. Although the LSK developed a sexual harassment policy in 2020, she says it remains largely unimplemented. Young advocates, especially those desperate for pupillage or employment, often face sexual exploitation with little protection, she notes.
Yet, she states that reporting mechanisms are unclear, confidentiality is weak, and the fear is real, especially when the perpetrator is a senior advocate. She insists that reform must account for gendered reporting realities, ensuring safe, confidential channels for women and men alike. “Protection must be visible,” she says. “People must see that when they report, action follows.”
Advocate E-Wallet
If elected Nairobi representative, Effie promises an advocate E-Wallet, a savings system integrated into the LSK portal, allowing advocates to save gradually for practising certificates and mandatory continuing professional development fees, easing the January financial shock that forces many into inactive status.
She also pledges structured, practical mentorship, targeting juniors with seniors or mid-bar advocates on specific skills such as billing, firm management, client acquisition, and financial sustainability.
With her heart on empowering the unemployed and young advocates, she will be on a mission to ensure transparent allocation of public interest litigation, opening up public interest cases to more of them. To pair them with senior mentors so that they don’t just earn an income but also learn in the process from the seasoned advocates.
For Effie, leadership is not about prestige, it is about proximity. “I relate to these challenges because I live them. And when solutions come from lived experience, they are not theoretical, they work.”
Public interest litigation versus fairness
She believes reforming the legal profession is not an abstract idea but a question of systems that either allow advocates to live with dignity or quietly push them out. One such system, she says, is public interest litigation, which she believes has immense potential to both serve the public and support struggling advocates; if only it were handled transparently.
“Public interest matters should not be allocated based on who knows who,” she says. “They should be allocated based on expertise and need.”
Public interest litigation, she explains, covers cases where the LSK has legal standing on behalf of the public, such as constitutional challenges, habeas corpus applications for missing persons, or matters questioning the legality of government appointments.
“These are cases no individual can bring on their own,” she says. “Only LSK has the locus.” Yet, without reform, she argues, these matters risk becoming inaccessible to the very advocates who need work the most.
Effie returns repeatedly to one central belief: advocates cannot serve the public if they themselves are broken. “Advocates keep saying we take care of the public, but we do not take care of ourselves. How do we then show up for justice when we are mentally, emotionally, and socially exhausted?”
Her vision is of an advocate who is whole—mentally well, emotionally supported, socially connected, and financially stable enough—to practise ethically. “That is the advocate who can truly defend the public.”
Supporting young advocates
Handling politically sensitive cases in Kenya, Effie notes, has increasingly come with intimidation, sometimes directed at advocates and sometimes even at judges. She is candid about the risks, pointing to moments such as the Gen Z-led demonstrations, when advocates working late nights and on sensitive matters feared for their safety.
She explains that the LSK has previously partnered with civil society organisations to provide safe spaces where threatened advocates, and sometimes their families, could temporarily relocate until it was safe to return home. “That is something the society must strengthen,” she adds. “Because courage should not cost someone their life.”
Supporting young advocates, Effie argues, also means expanding where and how law is practised. One initiative she is particularly proud of is the Know Your Tribunals series, a monthly training programme she helped organise at the Nairobi branch.
The programme introduces advocates to alternative practice spaces such as the Tax Appeals Tribunal, where non-advocates currently dominate despite the fact that lawyers are well placed to practise there. “These are real opportunities,” she says. “But many young advocates don’t even know they exist.”
She is also pushing peers to prepare for emerging fields such as technology law and artificial intelligence, warning that failure to upskill risks leaving young advocates behind in a rapidly changing legal market.
While she believes deeply in giving back to society, she is critical of how state-funded pro bono work, especially through the judiciary, is structured. Advocates handling serious criminal cases, sometimes for three or four years, receive a flat fee of about Sh30,000, paid only after the matter concludes, she explains.
Accessibility
On the values that will guide her leadership, she places accessibility above all else, stating that advocates need leaders who pick calls and respond. Others are transparency, which she describes as essential, particularly in decision-making and the use of LSK funds, as well as integrity, which she says is critical, especially in managing resources entrusted to the society.
At the end of her two-year-term, she says, the advocates would measure her success against her manifesto, and her honesty. “If I deliver, members will see it,” she says. “If I don’t, I owe them an explanation.”
