The term “new legal technology” evokes leading edge technology which is the process of being adopted by the legal community.

The new legal technology has been a key driver of legal delivery paradigm shift from brute force labor to automation and value maximization of legal resources.

New legal technology has significantly remodeled every sphere of our legal life. Teaching and learning are easier and legal businesses are transacting with greater, easy and efficient.

With cognizance to the fact that new legal technology has advanced the customary or traditional life in the world at large and the quintessential role it plays in legal practice and education, the conservative legal profession sluggishly move towards the line of technology.

2020 promises to be a significant year for the profession’s growth, adopting and reliance on new legal technology. Innovation has become one of the buzziest priorities in law practice. As our world and clients evolve, there are increasing demands on our legal industry to lead. The new legal technology has become an integral part of creating, efficiency and promoting access to justice.

Despite the looming challenges, the impact of new legal technology in the twenty’s century cannot be overemphasized.

Firstly, the new legal technology is the catalyst by which the world turns. Over the past several years, technology has had a significant impact on the practice of law. The practice of law for lawyers is changing as well. lawyers once did all of their legal research using books. However, now most of that research is done electronically with legal research databases such as Google.com search, Ask.com , DuckDuckGo search, Bindu search, Yandex.com, westlaw , lexis Nexis and so on. Several technologies have come out recently that are changing the legal profession on the significant basic. One of the biggest that gas enabled new legal technology in law to involves is the digitalization and storage of case law , statutes and regulations.

Secondly, the new legal technology has gradually replacing traditional paper invoice just as such as the internet has become an important legal marketing tool. Recently as result of global pandemic COVID-19 many people using electronic and internet to search for relevant legal information and legal tips on how to solve their day to day life, career and legal business problem. This encourage many lawyers , judges and law students to venture into legal technology and artificial intelligence to solve these problem easily and faster.

Thirdly, the new legal technology is equally important in corporate legal organization that helps in-house counsel. Law firms need to leverage on technology as a key to strategies asset. Computer programme can be created for almost every corporate function including handling registration at the Corporate Affairs Commission, filing trademark and patents, e-court filing, e-payment, creating organization charts and connecting clients with lawyers. Although the conservative legal industry has been slow to embrace technology with may argument against the use of those tools but no matter how hard we shy away from this reality.

Lastly, the new legal technology has helped to democratize the delivery of legal services by stripping lawyers of their monopoly as sole source providers of legal service. Technology has democratized access to legal sources materials consider for instance, Harvard Law School’s decision to digitalize and provide free online access to more 40 million pages of case law in the law library as part of it free law initiative. Technology and business promote efficiency, predict risk,gauge value, reduce cost of while mitigating the risk.

CHALLENGES OF THE NEW LEGAL TECHNOLOGY

The infrastructure capabilities, economic, regulations and societal needs faced by legal service, tech companies and legal business across the world particularly in 54 Africa countries are very different to those in Europe and north America. When identifying and benchmarking innovation in legal services, we must look beyond our previous ideas of legal tech to include alternative forms of innovation conquering the more fundamental challenges of these jurisdictions. The infrastructural breakdown in the Africa countries equally hinders the speedy growth of new legal technology. Circumstances of months – lasting power outage makes it impossible to access online documents and make use of the internet. Most Africa countries patronize the internet providers such as MTN , and Globacom for lack of other network providers. Without strong network access to the internet is made almost impossible and this frustrates the use of the internet for legal services.

Also, laziness is a big attribute of world law students today, the access to online research works have greatly slowed and adversely affected students research strength, it is very easy to go online, get article, copy and paste and then make its theirs.

Basic access to the law itself it still a problem in some African jurisdictions. Younger generations along with more progressive legislatures , are mwly their core legal texts online but some specialized area are still difficult to finds, examples;

Tunga innovations has provided an app. that informs users in Tanzania about their employment rights. Zambian platform apptorney provides legal content, that is properly limited categorized and indexed for more efficient and user friendly search. Bitshelter is a Uganda interactive system that disseminates shares and displays legal information in real time to assist the lawyers. Ivy Intelligence is a comprehensive social networking of Nigerian case law using Artificial Intelligence to move legal research easy and fast for lawyers, magistrates and judges in Nigeria.

Moreover, fake news and rumors easily circulates online, thus could lead to the transfer of wrong new legal information to the legal information to the general public creating misconception and misunderstanding of the law. In addition equally online legal research are usually not free money is required to subscribe to them and world law students and lawyers would rather go through the pain of flipping though pages than paying for easy online information. This greatly slows down the amount of subscribers to Computer Assistant Legal Research Platforms.

In conclusion, there is need for a better and more developed infrastructural framework, internet service and constant power supply cannot be overemphasized. The world is going digital, virtual court hearing and the need to move with it wholly fundamental. The plagiarism check device are not alien to the world. These devices should be employed to place check and discourage the theft of intellectual property and other matters of plagiarism. Intellectual property and copyright laws should be fully enforced and rumors and fake news on social media thoroughly scrutinized. According to George Bernard postulate that *progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their mind cannot change anything*, the legal profession no matter how traditional and conservatively sacred it is, must dust off the cobwebs of resistance and don a new futuristic suit. Embracing the change of new legal technology is a challenges but as all toward thinking legal professionals will known, with challenge come opportunities. So new legal technology, driven by the application of tools like AI , ML and Robotics has impacted positively across strata of the legal service, despite it few negative effects.

John Avoseh Esq,

Javoseh@gmail.com