The firm

A & J Legal Consultants is a specialist Pakistani legal boutique. The firm operates from offices in Islamabad and Karachi, with trade, customs, and regulatory work led from Islamabad and industrial regulatory compliance led from Karachi. The work is structured around the partners' complementary specialisms rather than around a generalist platform: the firm takes work where it can claim genuine depth, and refers work that lies outside its competence.

The firm was founded by Abu Muhammad Azfar Naeem after seven years at Pakistan's National Tariff Commission, where he conducted the Commission's litigation across the High Courts and the Anti-Dumping Appellate Tribunal and contributed to the drafting of the principal subordinate legislation under the trade-remedy statutes. The practice is built around that institutional experience and around a partnership with Jawed Imam, whose decade of work advising industrial clients in Karachi's Sindh Industrial Trading Estate complements the trade and customs practice with a settled industrial compliance capability.

The firm operates on a small number of principles. We work in areas where we have genuine depth and we are honest about the limits of that focus; where a matter falls outside what we can do well, we say so. We prefer to be retained for substantive work rather than to be on a panel of firms a client uses by rotation. We give written advice in the form clients can use — short where short is enough, longer where the matter requires it, and never padded for its own sake. Our fees are agreed in writing and are structured to reflect the work, not the prestige of the matter.

Our clients include domestic manufacturers in trade-remedy proceedings, importers and foreign exporters defending against them, industrial groups managing their compliance obligations within and outside the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate, technology and software businesses, and Pakistani and international businesses with regulatory questions arising from cross-border trading activity.

A & J Legal Consultants LLP is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan as a limited liability partnership.