At a press conference following the company’s product showcase at the 66th Nigerian Bar Association Annual General Conference, the Managing Director of LawPavilion BusinessSolutions, Ope Olugasa, unveiled an ecosystem that lets Partners, General Counsel and Attorneys General shift their teams from linear research to lateral thinking, while guarding against the hallucinated authorities now appearing incourtrooms.
Among the key developments unveiled are the integration of Sasegbon’s Laws of Nigeria into LawPavilion Prime and Primsol, an AI-powered Citation Checker and Document Reviewcapability, upgraded Legal Analytics & Insights, the enhanced CaseManager, and LawPavilion Elite, an enterprise platform designed to help organisations preserve and deploy theirinstitutional legal knowledge through customised AI.
The announcements come as lawyers globally confront the growing use of general-purpose AI in legal work, and the risk of fabricated or misleading legal authorities.
The problem the profession has been talking around
Mr. Olugasa opened by naming what he described as the elephant in every legal AI conversation of the past four years: hallucination. A growing global database now tracks instances of fabricated authorities reaching courtrooms, and, he noted, a recent ACGC webinar for African legal leaders revealed that the majority of those filings did not come from lawyers at all. They came from self-represented litigants
The implication for Nigerian practice, he argued, is not that self-representation will surge here. It is subtler, and closer to home.“Legal knowledge is now being audited, silently, daily, against AI,” Mr. Olugasa said. For the lawyer in private practice, the audit may come from a client’s technology-fluent daughter running an opinion through a chatbot at the dinner table. For the general counsel, from a fellow director cross-checking advice before a board meeting. For the Attorney General, from a special adviser with the Governor’s ear.
He identified a second and more commercially serious threat: the same general-purpose AI available to lawyers is equally available to their clients. Where a legal opinion is indistinguishable from what a client can generate at no cost, the professional’s edge erodes.
Linear work versus lateral judgment
Mr. Olugasa’s central argument distinguished linear thinking, the structured, step-by-step process of evaluating facts, identifying issues and applying rules and precedent to reach a predictable conclusion, from lateral thinking, the ability to step back andapproach a problem from an unexpected but effective angle.
Lateral thinking, he said, is where lawyers create their greatest value: strategy, judgment, and the instinct to spot the argument, the risk or the opportunity that no one else in the room has seen.It is what clients actually pay for.
The difficulty is that the sheer volume of linear work is crowding out the capacity for lateral brilliance. A lawyer buried in research, document review and citation verification has little bandwidth left for original thought.“Let trusted AI carry the linear,” he told the plenary, “so you are freed for the lateral.”
LawPavilion AI and the citation checker
Sitting above the expanded library is LawPavilion AI, which the company positions in deliberate contrast to general-purpose systems: legally trained and grounded in authoritative Nigeriansources rather than the open internet. Its most pointed new capability is document review with citation verification. A practitioner can submit any legal document, including one received from an opposing party, and have every citation checked: whether the authority exists, and whether it addresses the subject matter for which it was cited.
Mr. Olugasa illustrated the value with a scenario familiar to corporate counsel: a rival opinion arrives from a client’s managing director, polished and dense with citations. Submittedto LawPavilion Document Review, the analysis returns in about a minute. Four of six citations exist, but none address the matter in dispute. The practitioner responds with the authentic authorities. “That,” he said, “is the difference between being questioned by AI and being vindicated by it.”
One ecosystem for the modern law firm
Addressing another concern raised during the press conference: the fragmentation of legal technology across multiple products and subscriptions, Mr. Olugasa pointed to LawPavilion Elite as the company’s response, describing it as an integrated environment that “brings together an e-library, customised AI and Case Management capabilities within a unified subscription.”
Extending technology beyond law firms to in-house legal teams
Asked whether the technology could serve corporate legal departments managing multiple matters and external counsel, Mr. Olugasa pointed to solutions designed for in-house teams, notably its Contract and Compliance Management System, which “enables legal departments to manage contracts, cases and their status, correspondence with external solicitors, board activities and other legal responsibilities from a single interface.” For businesses with matters running across different locations or multiple external counsel, he added, the goal is to give legal leadership greater visibility into what is happening, where, and what requires attention.
AI will not make lawyers less creative, it will raise the bar
Asked whether AI could diminish ingenuity among lawyers, Mr. Olugasa drew an analogy with the calculator. “When calculators emerged, there were concerns that they might make students less capable at mathematics. Instead, technology changed what was possible and allowed mathematics education to move beyond calculations that could be automated.”
Legal AI, he argued, will do the same. Rather than making lawyers less thoughtful, properly deployed AI removes the repetitive work that consumes professional time and frees them for more sophisticated legal reasoning.
“Our objective is not to make Nigerian lawyers dependent on technology,” Olugasa said. “It is to give them the tools to do what only lawyers can do – better, faster and with greater confidence.”