Partner Heather Nyong’o’s decision to change her surname due to her December 2018 marriage, a personal brand she spent years establishing a reputation for as a top trial lawyer, was the subject of a recent column in The American Lawyer’s Litigation Daily.

As columnist Jenna Greene noted, a lawyer’s name change can be much more daunting and consequential than name changes in other industries. In the legal sector, personal names are brand names used to market lawyers or firms.

“Within a firm, a lawyer’s brand is his or her individual name,” Greene wrote. “There is no product. You are the product.”

But for Nyong’o, it came down to trusting her sense that her name change was the right move, similar to the counterintuitive thinking that she used to benefit a  client during a recent high-profile trial. 

From the column: “She has yet to appear in court as ‘Heather Nyong’o’ and doesn’t know if people will do a double-take when they see she’s a green-eyed blonde. (Nor for that matter will people necessarily think it’s a Kenyan name—some suppose it’s Japanese or Eastern European.) But she’s already encountered colleagues flummoxed by the pronunciation. Last week, Nyong’o spoke on a panel at the American Bar Association’s spring antitrust meeting, and was introduced as ‘Heather Tewksbury.’ When she interjected to note her new name, she said the moderator responded, ‘I didn’t even want to try to pronounce it.’ No matter. ‘I’m so proud of this name,’ she said. ‘People [will] get over it.’”