African technology giant, SystemSpecs, has urged lawyers in Nigeria to embrace the disruption caused by technology for the legal profession, with ICT playing increasingly significant role in human lives.
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.
