‘We count ourselves highly favoured to have come this far’ – Ope Olugasa, Lawpavilion boss
LawPavilion, one of Africa’s leading electronic Legal Research and practice management solution providers, says it’s a season of appreciation as it marks 10t significant years of providing cutting edge IT solutions for the legal industry in Nigeria and Africa; boasting of a success story that is worth celebrating. With offices in every geo-political zone in Nigeria such including Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Kano, Enugu, Warri and Ilorin, Lawpavilion continues to offer solutions that meet the needs and enhances the productivity of the 21st century legal practitioner. The Flagship product, known as the LawPavilion Electronic Law Reports (LPELR) continues to dominate the legal software market, maintaining its place as the most widely accepted and citable Electronic Law Report in Africa. Other solutions include, the LawPavilion Case Manager for individuals and Law Firms, LawPavilion Court Manager, LawPavilion Solicitors’ ToolKit, and the LawPavilion Students’ Pack. In this interview, Ope Olugasa, Managing Director, Grace Infotech Limited, developers of the LawPavilion Suite, speaks of service, legal development with IT Solutions and most importantly, a deep gratitude for an industry that has been kind not just to the company but to all its products and services. EXCERPTS…
10 YEARS: THE JOURNEY
We are very excited to be celebrating our 10th year of being at the forefront of Electronic Law Reporting in Nigeria. We count ourselves highly favoured to have been able to sustain our business over the past 10 years that we have been in the legal services industry. Our first commercial outing was the 2007 NBA-AGC at Ilorin, Kwara State. It is heart-warming and deeply gratifying that we have taken giant strides upon giant strides since then and we are truly grateful to God.
IN RETROSPECT
Looking back, our achievements are so numerous, however, I will highlight a few. From available statistics, the average Nigerian business usually fails within the first 5 years, so we are pleased that we are not part of that statistic, celebrating our 10th year in business is definitely a significant milestone.
In terms of our achievement in the legal services industry in Nigeria, oh it has been quite an adventure. I can never forget our first outing at the NBA 2007 Conference in Ilorin where lawyers came to our exhibition stand and laughed at us, that no Nigerian court would permit a counsel to cite electronic law reports in open court or in written submissions. In fact, a particular judge was mentioned as not being receptive to such “disruptive practices”. Well, our testimony is that this particular Judge is one of our subscribers today, with electronic law reports being a permanent fixture on the landscape of legal practice in Nigeria.
As you may already be aware, for several years we have traversed the length and breadth of Nigeria, preaching the “gospel “of technology adoption in legal practice. So we feel immense satisfaction to see the wide acceptability from the industry now.
More recently, we have been focusing on using technology to solve local problems, especially within the legal services industry. For example, a couple of years ago, we got the opportunity to work with the leadership of the NBA to re-introduce online registration for the biggest gathering of lawyers in the world, that is the Annual General Conference of the NBA. Using software developers trained in Nigerian universities and polytechnics, we were able to design, develop and deploy a registration portal which contained the list of all legal practitioners called to Bar in Nigeria and particularly those who have been verified. Deploying that solution has helped the leadership and administration of the NBA to better plan and prepare for this annual gathering. Furthermore, deploying technology as we did checkmated the incidents of a handful of legal practitioners not paying the correct fees for the Conference as was obtainable before our involvement.
We derived a great sense of pleasure of making that enormous contribution to NBA Conferences since 2014. It is important to state that the registration portal and overseeing the registration process including printing the name tags were our small contributions as part of our sponsorship towards the NBA Conferences, we never billed or charged a penny for it. Although a number of participants had erroneously thought we failed to make conference materials available, I think its important to clarify at this juncture that we were never in charge of production of conference materials, NBA handled it themselves. We always seek for ways to add value to the legal services industry in Nigeria and we do not intend to relent anytime soon, in spite of previous mistakes and challenges. We are a value-oriented and value-driven company and it has been working for us from inception till date.
Based on the success recorded with online registration for the NBA-AGC, we feel a sense of elation that the industry has now also recognized electronic voting, which was the means of voting used for last year’s election into the National Executive Officers of the NBA and which we were opportuned to have worked in conjunction with the leadership of the NBA to provide the portal and voting mechanisms in 2016.
Moreover, we take a special sense of pride that even the judiciary is now at the fore front of the drive for using technology in the adjudication process in our courts. Nowadays, it is commonplace to hear “electronic filing and service”, “electronic case management”. We have truly moved forward from campaigning for adoption of technology, now we are using technology to solve salient and lingering problems. We feel so blessed and grateful indeed for what we have been able to accomplish in the industry.
Today, you will find subscribers to LawPavilion electronic legal research software in the Judiciary, in big and small Law Firms, in Faculties of Law, among law school students, and more recently in neighbouring countries and outside the shores of our great country. Indeed, we can say we have started exporting technology. It is now acceptable to see the citation of “LPELR” in judgments from the highest courts in our country to the pages of treatise by erudite scholars and authors. It certainly has been a very rewarding and gratifying journey for us as a corporate organization operating in this space.
WHAT SORT OF CELEBRATION WOULD BE BEFITTING FOR THIS 10TH ANNIVERSARY?
For us, this 10th year celebration is an opportunity to express our immense gratitude first to God Almighty and to all our stakeholders through the years. More importantly, it also affords us the opportunity to give back – to give back to our subscribers and stakeholders, to give back to our country Nigeria and especially, an opportunity to give back to the legal services industry. We have several events lined up towards the 2017 NBA-AGC and really the excitement is at a crescendo.
As part of our celebrations, we will be making our latest product – a legal analytics software which we have named “LawPavilion Prime” commercially available for our teeming subscribers. We had unveiled the prototype of LawPavilion Prime containing only about 5,000 Supreme Court Judgments sometime last year along with our Judicial Appreciation Awards Ceremony – the Words in Gold Awards where we recognised and celebrated Justices of the Supreme Court of Nigeria through a compilation of their pronouncements through the years. We went as far back as the very first set of Justices who sat in the hallowed Chambers of the Supreme Court and we enjoyed the rare privilege of having the Keynote Address delivered by his Excellency, the Acting President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo SAN
But we felt our subscribers deserved the very best at all times, so we went back to the drawing board to ensure that we included Court of Appeal judgments into LawPavilion Prime to give it the edge over mere electronic law reports. We are pleased to announce that work is now complete on the software for PC and Android versions with iOS following very quickly and we are poised to deploy this solution commercially at the 2017 NBA Conference. Through our patented technology for analytics, we are set to provide Legal Practitioners with over 13,000 reported cases with analytical ratings to ensure that at all times, a LawPavilion subscriber is relying on the best and highest ranked authority on a principle of Law.
The LawPavilion Prime remains the most sophisticated product on legal analytics in Nigeria or dare I say African legal services market today. With the introduction of Legal Analytics, what we are providing for legal practitioners is not just a compilation of reported cases. We have further to highlight locus classicus on any issue of law inputted into the search engine. Also based on the search results, the LawPavilion Prime using a unique algorithm calculates the precedential value of each case and then collates all relevant cases on that issue or principle of Law as pronounced by the courts especially at the appellate levels. In fact, LawPavilion Prime is best experienced as mere words do not do sufficient justice to the ingenuity that has gone into creating this new product. It is truly an excellent example of showcasing the growth and development of Nigerian jurisprudence and we are very proud to have raised the bar again in electronic law reporting by introducing analytics into law reports. We really look forward to showcasing the unique product to our subscribers at the NBA Conference 2017 as they join us to felicitate our 10th year anniversary and we are positive that as they begin to use this product as we head into a new legal year, their legal practices would improve significantly and become even more profitable.
Moreover, we also have amazing discounts and loads of freebies for our teeming subscribers at the NBA Conference holding between the 18th -24th of August 2017 at the Landmark Event Centre, Oniru Lagos. We look forward especially to welcoming our subscribers who live and practice outside Lagos State to the Centre of Excellence. It is going to be a beautiful celebration with lots and lots of gifts and prizes.
NEW PRODUCT ALERT!
We will also be celebrating with Nigerians as we have developed a new Android App called “Know My Rights”. As a company that invests heavily in research and development, we observed that people are reluctant to consult legal practitioners due to a myriad of factors such as ignorance, perception that legal services are expensive and time-consuming amongst others. But we know that the services of lawyers are indispensable for us to have a sane society where the rule of Law prevails.
Furthermore, based on our research, we realised that while English is the official language, there is a language that transcends all tribal divides of our country and that language is “PIDGIN”. So through the “Know My Rights” app, we have brought together the best of culture through language and technology. Working with renowned language scholars, we are pleased to present our “Know My Rights” App which contains the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended), easy to understand presentation of Child’s Right Act, the Domestic Violence Law of Lagos State, Legal Issues on Interaction with the Police, the VIO and Federal Road Safety Corps Acts and several others.
ENGLISH AND VERNACULAR VERSIONS OF APP
We have included the English and Pidgin language versions of these salient Laws in the app so that anyone can read them, understand them and be properly guided.
We have even translated the Nigerian Constitution into Pidgin Language. As more people become aware of the position of the Law, the agitations against the Judiciary and Legal Practitioners would be put in proper perspective by the general public. We also firmly believe that access to and usage of this app would serve as a marketing tool for Lawyers because the need for lawyers would be very clear and conspicuous.
Our continued survival is predicated on our Clients and subscribers’ businesses, so we will explore opportunities to use technology to move our subscribers’ businesses forward. The app is already available for download FREE OF CHARGE on the Google Play Store and we will encourage many Nigerians to take advantage of its availability. As time progresses, we will add other relevant and far-reaching Laws to the App. We look forward to the App becoming a learning tool in our primary and secondary schools so that the Nigerian child or citizen is aware of his rights and responsibilities which are a sine qua non for growth and development of our great nation.
ARE YOU PART OF THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE NBA-AGC, 2017?
First, we would like to seize this medium to express our immense gratitude to the leadership of the NBA and the TCCP for considering us worthy partners to the association of the noblest profession. To us, it is a testament to all we have been able to accomplish these past years.
Over the years, we have enjoyed the opportunity to act as ICT Partner to the NBA-AGC and indeed it has been a worthwhile partnership for us, having the stamp of approval from the industry that we serve. Now, due to the fact that we enjoyed such excellent rapport with the NBA, there were discussions for us to collaborate with the NBA-AGC through the TCCP for the 2017 Conference. However, we couldn’t afford to meet the request made of us, which was to avail Conference attendees of our flagship product free of charge for one year.
Based on our financial projections for the year and beyond, acceding to that request would have signalled the death knoll for our business because we invest heavily in research and development. Bearing in mind such costs incurred and to be incurred on R & D, we were unwilling to sacrifice quality on the altar of making a quick buck or scoring cheap points. As a company, our passion and dedication to the Nigerian legal community and the NBA is unflinching, and there is no going back in serving Nigerian Lawyers with integrity and excellence. Hence we were left with no option than to seek other avenues of partnership with the NBA for the 2017 AGC. So while our products are not being given for free at the Conference, we have various huge discounts and other freebies to give our teeming, loyal subscribers and those who visit our exhibition stand at the Conference.
We are however very gratified that our efforts in the past is now paving way for many more service providers to explore means of providing value, no matter how minimal to their primary industry of operation. We have always prided ourselves as pioneers, charting a new course for others to follow, knowing that the customer is the ultimate beneficiary at the end. So we are indeed elated and pleased to continue to occupy this pace setting role in the industry.
AFTER ALL SAID AND DONE, WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR THIS LARGEST GATHERING OF LAWYERS IN NIGERIA?
We have always supported NBA Conferences and this year, we won’t be doing any less than we have usually done because we are firm believers in giving value to our subscribers. For the past couple of years, we have ensured that Conference attendees can keep their fingers on the pulse of happenings in their office through our free Wi-Fi centres and this year, we would be taking it up several notches. We have several gift items for our well-wishers which we know will be most useful to them personally and professionally. The Conference will also afford us the opportunity to showcase our “Proudly Nigerian” tech-solutions for individual Legal Practitioners, Law Firms, the Judiciary and In-House Counsel.
We take enormous pride in the competence of our locally sourced and trained staff who are able to create products that compete with the very best from around the world. That confidence fuels our continued involvement with the Nigerian Bar Association Conferences as well as the prestigious Annual Conference of the International Bar Association Conferences. The NBA-AGC will also afford us the opportunity to interact and meet with our subscribers, attend to their complaints and listen to their suggestions for improvement in what we do. We take industry feedback very seriously and the NBA-AGC affords us a good opportunity to hear from our teeming subscribers.
COULD YOU SHARE WITH US SOME OF THE FEEDBACK YOU’VE RECEIVED IN THE LAST 10 YEARS REGARDING THE LAWPAVILION RANGE OF PRODUCTS?
We believe our biggest impact for our subscribers has been to afford them the confidence to do what they do best. Time and time again, we have heard and received testimonials from our subscribers about how much ease using LawPavilion has brought into their practice. We have several good reports about the speed with which Judges now deliver rulings because with the tap of a button, authorities are culled up though our search engine which in turn aids the speed of dispensing justice.
Furthermore, our boldness in being Headline Sponsor for international conferences such as the IBA Investing in Africa Conference and regularly showcasing our products at international exhibitions has cemented the confidence our subscribers place in our products.
For the general public, we believe our impact will be felt even more through our public-education tools, one of which is the “Know My Rights” app that I mentioned earlier. As we continue to use technology to solve local problems, we have no doubt that our country will move several positions forward on global indexes such as the World Bank sponsored Doing Business Index and the World Justice Index.
WHAT KEEPS YOU MOTIVATED AND RESILIENT IN THE INDUSTRY IN A COUNTRY WHERE SMALL BUSINESSES CONTINUE TO FAIL AND COLLAPSE?
For us, our motivation is not and has never been about just making money. We are keen to export technology from Nigeria to other parts of Africa and then to the world at large. Keeping our motivation before our eyes constantly reminds us of where we want to go. In the word of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in his book, “Flashes of Thought”, he said and I quote:
“Without a vision to guard our paths, and without ambition that knows no limits, we can never build a bright future… the impossible cannot be where there is perseverance and faith.”
As a Company, the above quotation is our mind-set, indeed impossible is nothing to those who believe and persevere. We believe and we will persevere.