Israel Aye was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1993. He is a partner in Primera Africa Legal (PAL), a leading commercial law firm in Lagos. He is also co-founder of a legal platform, mylaw.ng. In this interview with Legal Editor JOHN AUSTIN UNACHUKWU, he shares his views on legal education, access to justice and the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the legal profession.
Can you give us a little insight into your legal background?
I am Israel Aye, a lawyer and I have been in practice for about 26 years. I have most of my practice years in the oil and gas industry where I spent about 20 years. Four years ago, I left the oil and gas for what I refer to as the vast market space of Nigerian legal market and I am currently a co-founder of a legal platform known as mylaw.ng. So, that is my current entrepreneurial endeavour.
What was your vision when you went into law practice as a young lawyer?
As a matter of fact, what I set out to achieve was to become a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), so when I came to Lagos, my first employment was in the chambers of Professor Safiru Abiodun of blessed memory. That was where I cut my legal teeth and started out, but life took me to a totally different direction. I spent about two years there and left to join an estate development entity as an in house legal officer, from there I left for Shell. This was initially in an administrative capacity for two years and then joined the legal function where I was for about 10years and left in 2010. So, my romance with energy practice was very accidental, but I can tell you it was love at first sight.
As a commercial lawyer, how are you assisting young lawyers and new wigs to surmount the challenges you faced in your early years of practice?
Well, that is a broad question, but on a personal level, I would say that one of the things I have done is to embrace capacity building, continuous legal education, coaching and mentoring. To whom much is given, much is expected, I am one of those who believe that the task of producing lawyers actually belong to the law firms not necessarily the Law School.
In my opinion, when you graduate from the Law School with a Barrister at Law (BL) certificate, what it means is that you have been licensed to apprentice and apprenticeship happens within a law firm. Yes, every apprentice would like to get good materials to work with, but irrespective of what the quality of the persons that are delivered to you is, it behooves the law firms to invest in the development of the people they take on. In that respect, both on the platform of Primera Africa Legal, which is my primary platform for practice, and other available platforms, I engage in capacity building largely as a mission.
How do you think we can improve access to justice through legislations and legal frameworks?
Well, my personal attitude is that you cannot have a just and prosperous society if people don’t have access to justice and if businesses don’t have access to qualitative legal services. Your question is what adjustments can be made in the legislative framework to change this and, perhaps, it is not the legislature that has the responsibility for changing this. This is one of those things that I believe we can change and rethink the whole service delivery format if you will, and it is that exact passion that drove me to start MyLaw.ng.
Mylaw.ng has been recognised as one of the ‘Leading Legal Tech Startups in Nigeria’. Can you tell us the inspiration and motive behind this innovation?
Thank you for mentioning one of our recognitions. We are young, we came into operation on May 29, 2018. So, we’re just about a year old. But we have invested energy, passion, resources, everything that we have into creating a platform that would provide access to justice for individuals, particularly, those who can’t afford conventional legal services and indeed, legal services to businesses, especially micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) largely.
The big corporations are much sorted out, though we are not necessarily saying we are excluding anyone. But there is a large chunk of people, who need legal support critically in order for them to safeguard their business and grow; they will mostly be the MSMEs. That is our inspiration, to enable in whatever little way to create a more just and prosperous society.
The vision of Mylaw.ng seems to revolve around the central theme of access to and affordability of justice. How far has it stayed true to that theme, especially in the context of today’s reality in Nigeria?
Essentially, access to justice alludes to individuals and access to legal services for businesses. That’s effectively what it is.
What is accessibility?
Accessibility is that the traditional mode of providing legal services requires you to get up and visit a physical location, the law office. The entire ambience and aura can be intimidating to some people, not necessarily to the big corporates. Indeed, when the big corporates are coming, we are the ones who roll out the red carpets; we roll out the drums and welcome them. But for the small guys, who are probably just looking to incorporate a company, register a business, carry out some small activity, the entire visit to a law firm is intimidating by itself. Not to mention the fact that when they visit the law office, they get served with bills that completely wipe them out.
What have you done differently about access to justice?
For easy access to justice, one of the things we have done differently is to provide our services on a digital platform. If I were to elaborate a bit, legal services are consumed in three major ways. There is consultation; that is when you get to ask a lawyer’s opinion or advice on an issue. There is documentation, which is where you are generating, reviewing or vetting legal documents, letters, and emails. There is also representation, which may be either at a Dispute Resolution session or a meeting for negotiations.
How does your concept come in here?
At MyLaw, two-third of that, that is documentation and consultation, can completely be consumed remotely without visiting a lawyer’s office. Representation by its very nature cannot be consumed remotely, but it is enabled so you can get on our platform, book an appointment and then a lawyer would be made available. There are a variety of issues that will require representation. There are legal emergencies, perhaps if you have issues with law enforcement agencies. We don’t exist to antagonise law enforcement or the Criminal Justice System. Remember I said for you to have a just society, there has to be access to justice.
So, what is the role of your lawyers here?
Our role is to ensure everything is done in accordance with law; the rights of the citizens are respected and protected as provided under the laws. Of course, if somebody has anything to answer to, then by all means, let them answer to the law for that, but let it be done within the ambit of the law and that is how we can be a civilised society where people would want to come to.
What about the cost? Have you done anything different from the status quo?
With respect to affordability, what we have done differently is to commoditise those services that can be commoditised. We are not the only ones doing this. This is being done across the world. There are indeed, a few other persons who have started doing it in Nigeria. In addition to commoditisation, we modularise what needs to modularised. If you take litigation for example, what we can do with respect to litigation is ascertain what is required for filing and then break down whatever is payable into appearance fees. Again, we haven’t necessarily invented this reality. This is how legal services are largely consumed in the provinces. What we have simply done is to borrow what happens in the villages and bring it to the townships where you have large populations and attempting to mainstream what is considered fringe practice. So, the twin initiatives of commoditisation and modularisation are how we are tackling cost and pricing to the market. So, that is how we are creating both access and affordability.
It is a known fact that legal services delivery has changed over the years. In addition to the traditional provision of legal services, clients now seek firms who can provide ancillary services. What has MyLaw done in that regard?
Again, the general belief is that there are too many lawyers for the opportunities that are in the traditional space. However, if you look at it from the perspective of what we and others like ourselves are doing, there is a huge portion of part of our population that we begin to extend legal services to. If you take the Legex Emergency Response Unit (LERU) for example, LERU is delivered by a panel of lawyers all across the country. We have these lawyers on panel, they came on board and when there is a situation that requires the intervention of a lawyer then they can go to the place, depending on where the location is.
What is the role of lawyers in all of these?
We are creating more opportunities for lawyers. That is the reality and we have just started. Eventually we will require the intervention of lawyers for litigation, meetings and a variety of legal activities. What it does is that it creates the opportunity for more lawyers and because we have more lawyers pitching in, we can deliver services faster. Effectively what LERU does for us is that it gives us the opportunity of an open shop.
Do you think Nigeria will be better off with more virtual law firms and less traditional law firms?
I think there is space for both of them and that is the reality. It is an interesting market in the sense that the potential is hugely untapped. If you take the conventional law practice, they have not even started to touch their potential because the potential with a big conventional law practice is indeed, to handle complex transactions. If I was to take the Infrastructure Blueprint, which was articulated about four years ago, that anticipated that Nigeria will require approximately three trillion dollars to bridge the infrastructure gap across a 20-year period. If you were to annualise that amount of money and distribute that across the 20-year period, that is over 50 billion dollars per annum.
If you assume only a percentage of that for professional or legal services, there is a huge amount of work that the traditional law firms are supposed to be doing. This is really the game and what a lot of international law firms are looking to Nigeria for. They are not interested in the current scope of work we are engaged in. No. They are positioning for the potential of the market in that sort of direction.
The virtual law firms are not set up to cater to that. It’s the conventional law firms that are supposed to bulk up and build capacity to be able to deal with those sorts of things, combine excellent legal service delivery with hospitality because for complex legal transactions you need little, half the time five-star hospitality, you need state-of-the-art meeting rooms and facilities in order to produce your deliverables. That does not change the fact that Nigeria also has a growing MSMEs population that cannot be served by the conventional legal practice. I think that is what people like ourselves can do and are doing differently.
Looking at legal practice and service delivery from a universal prism, does the Nigerian legal system produce enough lawyers, who in addition to the standard legal knowledge, possess progressive skills, abilities and mindsets?
I get a sense of what you mean, complete and rounded lawyers, I believe? The American Ambassador to Nigeria right about two years ago said in order for Nigeria to fulfil its potential it needs 10million mentors. My understanding of what he was saying in effect is that Nigeria has a huge capacity gap that it needs to bridge in order for it to meet its potential. I have been to a few fora, notably a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) forum where it was said the Infrastructural gap in Nigeria is not as a result of lack of money, but lack of capacity. Human resources is a critical gap in Nigeria and that does not refer to absolute numbers. It refers more to quality and what is referred to as “T shaped”.
So, it’s not only in the legal space, it is indeed, in every space that you need to guide people, upgrade their skills and basically just build capacity and that alludes to some of the things we talked about earlier. That is why I believe that continue legal education should be a critical part of any law firm and they should commit to it. At Primera Africa Legal, we train our lawyers every Friday. That is part of the vision to continue to upgrade people. At Mylaw, we run training most days of the week along with our work.
There are a lot of conversations going on as to the role of lawyers in the future. Do you believe Artificial Intelligence and legal technology will rid the legal profession out of existence?
That’s an interesting point. Change scares everybody, yet we are a product of change. As long as there are human beings on earth, I believe that human beings will continue to be the most important resource in production. One thing about change that scares us is that it takes us into the unknown. In these parts we still have jobs like lift operators. In my opinion that is such a waste of the human ability. These jobs have disappeared in other parts of the world and yet they have lower unemployment rates, higher GDP and the rest of it. What it means is that there are new and more effective jobs.
Even machines and learning capabilities which are some of the forms of Artificial Intelligence create new opportunities for people. That in itself brings new jobs. Do I anticipate a situation where human beings will be innovated out of jobs completely in the world? I don’t. I do believe that many functions and activities would be overtaken by technology. My attitude is that we should be open-minded and prepare to move as quickly to learn the new skills that are required to move into the future.
What do you foresee as the biggest challenge the legal industry in Nigeria will face?
Judging by what we see now, what appears to be our greatest challenge is just that tendency to be impervious to change. The magical thinking of many of us to think that we’re going to put ourselves in a bubble. Few years ago, what seemed like the hobby hops of the profession was globalisation of legal services. Many people’s response was that we should put the rules so no one comes in. Right now we have ended up in a situation where some of the most valuable transactions are supported remotely offshore.
So, yes they are not coming into your shores and doing the work but we utilise emails, people can travel to London, New York and instruct lawyers. So, they are sitting in their jurisdictions. Many people then said, maybe you should allow them in but regulate it. If you allow them in you keep track of it and you can monitor it. Essentially, we need to be strategic in our thinking for the present and for the future. The future is the future and we can’t do anything about it, but what we can do is deal with the challenges that confront it today with depth and courage and it would seem to me that when we arrive at the future we would find out that we were prepared after all.
Lastly, how can anyone interested get in touch with MyLaw.ng?
As you would expect, MyLaw has an active online presence. Users can sign up for free on www.mylaw.ng while email enquiries can be sent to info@mylaw.ng. We also have a web app, simply visit www.mylawng.com and add to your home screen. Mylaw is active on social media platforms and our handle for twitter is @mylaw_ng. For Instagram and LinkedIn, our handle is @mylawngcom. We are always accessible and we welcome everyone to try our new experience.