Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Lagos Branch 2021 Annual Law Week On 26/07/2021

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SPEECH BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF YEMI OSINBAJO, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE NIGERIAN BAR ASSOCIATION (NBA) LAGOS BRANCH 2021 ANNUAL LAW WEEK THEMED ‘DISRUPTION, INNOVATION AND THE BAR’ ON MONDAY, JULY 26TH, 2021

PROTOCOLS

I am honoured and delighted to join you as you start off the 2021 Annual Law Week events.

Through the years, the Lagos Bar has become perhaps the nation’s most active and influential voice for improving, not only the quality of law and the general legal and social environment but also the lot of lawyers.

Our growth as a nation depends not just on a system of enforceable and discernible laws and efficient institutions, but very significantly, on a vibrant private bar the best of which is represented by the Lagos Bar.

As one of you, I am proud that you have continued to strive to remain at the forefront of addressing – with introspection, thought, and strategic action – the issues that beleaguer or are taking on a threatening shape for our profession and the larger society. In any event, we may not have a choice, Lagos is the heart of commerce in Nigeria and certainly in sub-Saharan Africa, and as such the heart of the legal practice, especially commercial practice. What we do or do not do here in Lagos will always significantly affect our profession, and indeed the Nigerian economy.

The theme of this year’s Law Week – Disruption, Innovation, and the Bar is of tremendous importance today and I think we all agree that it demands urgency of both thought and action. Urgency because many of the predicted concerns that legal services would have to grapple with are already upon us. There is no turning back the clock of time on technology and its disruptive influence on society and the world of business and work. You only have to look at the smartphone and how it not only disrupted the mobile phone market but altered the sale of digital cameras rendering them more and more redundant as the quality of the cameras on smartphones improved.

Technological progression is always not a matter of “if” but “when”. So, Artificial Intelligence, AI, has become, and will continue to pose a major threat to many of today’s jobs, not just in Nigeria, but globally. According to a 2019 report by Deloitte, 31,000 jobs in the American law industry were lost due to automation, and by 2036, this number will grow to over 100,000 legal jobs.

With the continuing progress in technology, it is only a matter of time before the time capsule catches up with us in Nigeria. At the moment, AI is commonly used to perform tasks such as legal research and due diligence, document and contract review, and the prediction of legal outcomes. These are tasks that would have been performed by lawyers and as digitalization has already disrupted other industries, it is possible to predict that AI will go further and disrupt the business model of the legal industry.

For example, the AI legal service called ROSS. ROSS is an A.I. system that can research and offer legal opinions about questions that may be posed by lawyers. For example, users can ask ROSS, what is the position of New York State law or perhaps what is the position of UK law, as of 2020 on enforcement of foreign judgments?” And ROSS is then able to provide an answer, a properly considered legal opinion, taking into account all of the legal, case law, and statutory authority in order to be able to come to that conclusion.

So, providing predictive legal opinion is no longer the exclusive domain of lawyers, and as the years go by, it will become even more so.

How is the profession going to deal with the competitive pressure of technology? Would it recoil, combat, collaborate and/or innovate? And perhaps more importantly, what are the inefficiencies that we see today that will likely propel the push for disruption?

I think the times we are in call for answers to some of these questions, and some other hard questions: is our justice delivery system capable of supporting critical investments in today’s very dynamic economy?

How are we addressing the critical question of institutional capacity – the capacity of judges, court registries, court staff, and court infrastructure? What are we doing on an ongoing basis to ensure that our judicial officers in the courts and arbitral adjudicators are competent, knowledgeable, and trustworthy? Are the decisions of our courts predictable, spurring confidence in our judicial system?

Our jurisprudence on jurisdiction for example – does it promote legal certainty or help to cloud the issues even further? Have jurisdictional challenges become a potent weapon that strikes blindly in all directions? What is the quality of judicial thinking, is it a mere recourse to formulas, catchphrases, and clichés instead of a rigorous analysis of legislative intent and public interest and adding some common sense? Are procedural and adjectival rules a bane or tool for justice and speed? How does a system explain to society that the current rule established by our apex court is that the signature of a law firm instead of that of an individual legal practitioner on a court process could negate or extinguish the substance of the rights of individuals and commercial parties to justice in a decade’s old case or even in a case that is much older? Or how does justice delayed at the convenience of legal practitioners or the benefit of litigants become justice attained?

I argued an appeal at the Court of Appeal in 2013, and only to learn a couple of days ago as I discussed with former colleagues in the law firm where I worked, that the appeal at the Supreme Court is not even listed to be heard in 2021. As someone said, our problem is not access to justice, it is exiting the justice system with some credible result. Should we not be evolving a cost award system that recognizes the court as a finite public resource, and as such, delays and other dilatory tactics are visited with deterrent costs?

We are part of the global marketplace for investments and legal services. So, the extent to which we can attract business to our country depends in part upon investor perception of the quality of our justice delivery system. If we are seen as inefficient and ineffective, we would lose out to more efficient systems.

In fact, in a matter, IPCO and NNPC, a 2015 decision of the UK Supreme court, where a challenge to the enforcement of a Nigerian seated arbitration tribunal award came before the English Court of Appeal. The court referred to the delays in the parallel proceedings before a Nigerian Court as catastrophic and that it could take a further 30 years to resolve.

Incidentally, the expert witness who testified on delays in Nigerian Courts was a former Justice of the Supreme Court who testified that a case could take 20 to 30 years to resolve in a Nigerian Court.
Questions also need to be asked about the readiness of our profession to engage in new markets as presented by the African Continental Free Trade Area. Already Nigerian Banks and financial services are crossing borders in Africa, acquiring banks in several African countries. So, the AfCFTA will open new transborder commercial opportunities, our profession should pay attention to the rules of engagement for legal services and how they may propel our businesses.

Permit me also to raise the question of what legal training would look like in the next few years. Aside from all the issues around moving firmly to clinical legal education and a more problem-solving teaching orientation, we must also decide the question of whether the Nigerian law school needs to be an in-person residential course or mostly online, including taking examinations online.

Today, it is becoming obvious that cramping thousands of students into a classroom for lectures at the law school is a suboptimal teaching and learning environment. Even mock trials can be more effectively done online and courtroom processes can be put on videos and rewatched several times by students. Of course, we may still retain court and chamber attachments. These are all questions that are in the air and I trust that there might be an opportunity for some reflection on some of these issues at this law week or at future engagements.

Change is happening quickly all around us in every sphere of life. A sentimental clutching on to traditions will not serve us well. We have seen already that there is nothing sacrosanct about proceedings taking place in physical courtrooms. Virtual hearings are efficient and speedy. It is good to see that some States, including Lagos, issued practice directions that permitted virtual proceedings during the pandemic lockdown. It was also, I am sure for many of us, a pleasure to see that during the recent JUSUN strike, the Supreme Court delivered some time-bound judgments by Zoom. This was in line with the commitment the Chief Justice of Nigeria made recently to a full-scale digital revolution in the judiciary that would guarantee electronic filing of court processes, virtual hearings, and delivery of judgments. We, however, need to go a step further by institutionalizing these innovations, and others. Our justice delivery system, practice norms, and service levels must also show a propensity for innovation, for growth, and evolution.

We are at a point in history that either propels us forward or leaves us behind. The latter is clearly not an option.

It is therefore my very special pleasure to declare open the 2021 Law Week of the NBA Lagos Branch.

Thank you very much, God bless you.