According to an Executive Director at SystemSpecs, Deremi
Atanda, legal practitioners must rethink strategies of the past and present and
reposition for the future in order to stay relevant and productive in a
fast-paced tech-led environment.
Atanda said this at the 4th Young Wigs Conference, which was
held both virtually via Zoom and physically at Kano on the 27th and 28th of
September 2021 with the theme, “Techonomy.”
Organized by the Legal Concierge, the Young Wigs Conference
hopes to bring together legal practitioners, business professionals and the
tech world to discuss emerging areas of legal practice which were previously
overlooked.
According to Atanda, the rapid advancement in technology is
driven by certain trends that have occurred between 2000 and 2017, including
the geometric increase in computer processing power, an enormous reduction in
the cost of data and easier access to computers. The developments have led to a
booming ICT sector in Nigeria and beyond. This has resulted in huge technology
disruptions in several sectors of the economy, including the legal services
space.
“The world is fast-moving from brick-and-mortar led systems
which give no credence to data crunching and computerizations,” Atanda said.
Some of the technology currently disrupting the legal
profession include cloud computing, which provides critical advantages to
lawyers; Blockchain, which is creating new areas of legal practice; Big data,
which is making the process of discovery more complex, yet simpler at the same
time, and Artificial Intelligence, which can highlight pattern recognition from
big data and hence can offer predictions of future behaviour.
Some of the areas where legal practice is currently being
disrupted include the automation of law practice, legal research, documents
management, contracts and litigation, and predictive analytics. Therefore,
lawyers of the future will need an intimate and continuing understanding of how
to identify and use technology to meet their clients’ needs while leveraging
judgement, empathy, creativity, and adaptability.
Therefore, Atanda urged the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA)
and the Nigerian judiciary to rise up to this challenge by pushing for updates
of law training curricula and creating a scheme to equip fresh law graduate
with skills to thrive, amidst other recommendations.
The tech guru also advised young lawyers to up-skill,
understand and adopt technology, master those elements in law that cannot be
replaced by technology, and learn the business side of law
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