Nzili & Sumbi Advocates

Nzili & Sumbi Advocates is a Kenyan law firm whose tech-law practice has become the principal vehicle for strategic litigation against Big Tech in East Africa. The firm self-describes as "Tech Lawyers in Kenya", operates from Nairobi with secondary offices in Mwingi and Kithimani, and is led by managing partner Mercy Mutemi. Its structure is unusual in the movement landscape mapped here: a fee-earning Kenyan general-practice firm — running civil, criminal, employment, land, and human-rights matters alongside regulatory advisory — that has also built and now sustains a docket of large-scale, movement-aligned cases against Meta, OpenAI, and the outsourcing companies that supply them.

Practice and structure

The firm runs two formal divisions — a General Legal Practice and a Tech Law Practice — with the tech-law side encompassing digital-rights litigation, content-moderation labour cases, online-IP work, and regulatory engagement around Kenya's data-protection and cybercrime statutes. Mutemi, listed as a Partner on Business Daily's 2023 Top 40 Under 40 and confirmed as managing partner by April 2025, anchors the tech-law side; she frames her practice around three buckets — universal access to the internet, tech workers' rights, and fair products and consumer protection — and uses the firm's general-practice base to fund and sustain the strategic work.

Strategic-litigation portfolio

The firm's docket against Big Tech took shape from 2022 onward and now spans the major plaintiff vehicles by which African content moderators, data labellers, and affected communities are attempting to hold US platforms and their outsourcing chains accountable in Kenyan courts.

The Daniel Motaung case (2022– ). In March 2022 the firm published, on behalf of former Samasource employee Daniel Motaung, a pre-action letter listing twelve demands against Sama; Motaung subsequently filed suit in Nairobi against Meta and Sama alleging unlawful exploitation, mental-health harm, human trafficking, and union-busting. The firm has run the case alongside Foxglove since the outset, with Mutemi acting as Foxglove's self-described "Kenyan counsel".

The Tigray hate-speech case (December 2022– ). The firm represents Ethiopian academic Abrham Meareg, Amnesty International researcher Fisseha Tekle, and Kenya's Katiba Institute in a Kenyan High Court constitutional petition alleging that Facebook's algorithm amplified ethnically targeted hate speech during the Tigray war, contributing to the killing of Meareg's father. The case asks the court to order Meta to demote violent and incitement content and to establish a restitution fund.

The 185 former moderators' case (2023– ). Mutemi and the firm represent 184 former Facebook content moderators — workers laid off when Sama exited Meta's content-moderation contract and allegedly blacklisted from re-hire by successor vendor Majorel — in a suit challenging the mass dismissal and seeking damages for working conditions. In September 2024 the Nairobi Court of Appeal rejected Meta's jurisdictional appeal, allowing both this case and the Motaung suit to proceed to trial in Kenya.

The ChatGPT/Sama parliamentary petition (July 2023). Through Nzili & Sumbi, Kenyan data labellers who had reviewed graphic content used to train OpenAI's ChatGPT petitioned Kenya's National Assembly to investigate OpenAI and Sama. The petition prompted OpenAI to make its first formal response on its outsourcing arrangements and surfaced the labour underpinnings of frontier AI products in Kenyan public debate.

Internet-access and civic-speech work. Outside the platform-accountability litigation, the firm represents the Law Society of Kenya in a petition seeking a judicial declaration that internet access is a basic right in Kenya, and has acted in challenges to "fake news" offences under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act and in media-defence work for outlets sued over investigative reporting.

Relationship to Foxglove and The Oversight Lab

Two relationships shape how the firm operates inside the broader movement. The first is its long-running partnership with Foxglove: the UK community-interest company supplies international litigation capacity, communications infrastructure, and campaign support, while Nzili & Sumbi is the firm of record in Kenya. The second is the firm's relationship to The Oversight Lab, the standing legal-advocacy organisation Mutemi founded in mid-2025. The Oversight Lab grew out of the firm's casework lineage and now provides the systemic complement — policy, coalition-building, and worker-organising support — that the firm cannot sustain as a fee-earning practice; Mutemi continues to serve as managing partner of Nzili & Sumbi while running The Oversight Lab as its executive director.

Posture in the movement

Nzili & Sumbi is the rare commercial law firm whose tech-law programme functions as a movement vehicle. Where most of the organisations in this corpus are non-profits or coalitions, Nzili & Sumbi is a private partnership whose Kenyan general practice underwrites a docket of cases that have, since 2022, drawn content moderators, data labellers, Ethiopian war survivors, and broader Kenyan publics into a sustained legal and political argument about how Big Tech builds and deploys AI systems on the African continent. Its inclusion in the corpus tracks the mission's edge-case rule on programme-inside-portfolio organisations: the engagement of non-AI publics in shaping AI happens through the casework, regardless of the host structure.