About Uwakili
Uwakili is a public record of Kenya's legal system: who is on the roll of advocates, where the courts are, who sits in them, and what they decided.
Why it exists
Most of what a person needs in order to use the courts is already public and almost none of it is findable. The roll of advocates sits behind a search box that will not tell you who practises in your county. Court stations are listed as names without addresses. A litigant who wants to know whether their advocate is actually on the roll has no obvious way to check.
The consequences are not abstract. A hearing that a party is never told about is a ruling lost for non-attendance, and by the time they find out the window to appeal has closed. A register that only the profession can read is not a public record.
What it publishes
Facts, and only facts:
- Advocates: name, practice number, admission date, practice status
- Courts: station, division, county and where the building actually is
- Judicial officers: name, court, designation, date of appointment
- Decisions: the judgment as delivered, with a plain-language summary labelled as generated
What it refuses to publish
Not "has not built yet". Refused, with reasons, in our privacy notice:
- Win and loss rates for advocates. That is a claim about a person's competence published to their peers and their prospective clients, and it is aimed at 26,000 people who litigate for a living.
- Judge analytics. Ruling patterns, tendencies and timelines. France criminalised exactly this analysis in 2019. We will not publish it without written advice, and probably not then.
- Virtual court session links. Circulating those is a registrar's job under the practice directions, and some matters are deliberately private.
- Kenya Law's editorial work. Their headnotes, catchwords and summaries are theirs. The judgment underneath is public; we publish that and link to them for the rest.
Where the data comes from
Under licence, not by scraping. Each dataset, its publisher and its licence are listed on where this data comes from, and every page names its source.
If something here is wrong
Tell us. You get a reference straight away and a named person answers you. Corrections, removals and anything else are all handled the same way.
What this is not
Nothing on Uwakili is legal advice, and a listing here is not a recommendation. We publish what the record says, not what we think of anyone in it.