One of the major conclusions by stakeholders from a recent BusinessDay summit on legal business was that the justice system in Nigeria was technologically backward and lacks the capacity to compete with peers in South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya.
This is coming on the heels of the revelation that only ten percent of Nigeria’s more than 180 million people have access to the justice system. Less than ten percent can afford the premium placed on justice.
“The judicial system isn’t serving the purpose that it is supposed to serve,” said Ngozi Aderibigbe, partner at Jackson, Etti & Edu. “How much justice are people getting from the justice system?”
With little investments deployed to acquiring new technologies, justice delivery in the country remains at the mercy of traditional court processes, meaning that cases are delayed for centuries, data collected are lost in volumes of dusty files, lawyers resort to textbook tactics while judges lose track of time buried in frivolous lawsuits.
The result is an inordinately expensive justice system that excludes hundreds of millions of Nigerians who cannot afford the cost of delays and the rising cases of questionable judgments that have seen many judges sent on suspension thereby eroding what is left of the integrity of the judiciary.
The situation is even more worrisome. Abi Haruna, managing lead counsel, Siemens, said that foreign organisations and investors are also losing confidence in the system and if handed a choice, they would prefer their investments are under legal systems outside Nigeria.
“Delay, access and the quality of judgment are the major challenges in the Nigerian judicial system. Investors don’t like questionable justice systems. They want certainty,” he said during a panel session at the summit tagged ‘Disruptive Technology and the Future Realities of Legal Business’.
Part of the problem lies in the size of the industry. First, there is little information about the actual size of the justice system in Nigeria. However, almost on a daily basis, new law firms spring up across the country.
Collins Onuegbu, founder and executive vice-chairman of Signal Alliance, said information about the size of the justice system would help in determining the capacity of the market in providing sufficient services to the people. It would also be necessary for determining what technology investments to make. Adopting technology comes at a cost and only financially liquid law firms can make the necessary technology leap.
Given that the size of the largest law firm in the country, Aluko & Oyebode, only boasts of 85 staff members, compared to the top five legal firms in South Africa with each having more than 400 staff members, Nigerian law firms do have a long way to go
Gbenga Oyebode, chairman of Aluko & Oyebode said while the sufficiency of the talent in the justice system is not in doubt, they need to be trained to run the industry as a business. The majority of lawyers have not been trained in the broader picture of the system hence it is practically impossible to attract investments.
“I think the Nigerian law school isn’t fit for purpose, some Nigerian lawyers can’t read a balance sheet,” Oyebode said. “I think Nigerian lawyers think they are practising law and it isn’t a business but it is a business. Law isn’t just something that we practice.”
The industry’s seeming apathy to technology means that non-legal entities are beginning to encroach and even dominate most services that are usually seen as lawyers domain. High-demand legal services such as document review; Contract management; Litigation support; Discovery and electronic discovery; Contract lawyers and staffing; Investigation support and legal research; and IP management are becoming the primary domain of Alternative Legal Services Providers (ALSPs).
The ALSPs are playing a bigger role in providing legal services. Businesses are now more often turning to these innovative companies for many routine legal services, and law firms are even outsourcing certain jobs to ALSPs that would be too expensive and time-consuming to do in-house.
Olasupo Shashore, former attorney general and commissioner for Justice Lagos State said the adoption challenge can be addressed by removing regulatory bottlenecks that shut out opportunities for law firms to scale their business. The structure of the system, he says, isn’t such that law firms can take foreign investments.
