On the 9th of May, the NBA Section on Business Law, put out a call for applications for entrepreneurs building innovative solutions that generates both social and economic value for the digital society. The Innovating Hub Challenge was conceived as a way to contribute to the growth of the digital economy by providing seed funding and visibility to selected Nigerian innovators.
Of the 40 applications received that cut across various sectors including healthcare, insurance, education, fitness/wellness, transportation, financial services, and legal services, 10 startups were shortlisted for the second stage of the Innovation Hub Challenge, however 9 of them will be pitching to the panel on Day 2 of the conference . The 9 startups will showcase their solutions and be interviewed by a panel of judges who will be different from the assessors from the first stage.
Meet the startups :
XCrowme is a platform for cross border remittance for individuals and global payment gateway for businesses. At Xcrowme, people from different countries can exchange their local currency into bitcoins. It also provides a web wallet from where you can send and receive Bitcoin transactions. Xcrowme’s mission is to make the global economy accessible in all corners of the world through Bitcoin trading.
Aider is building a new way to handle emergencies and saving lives one click at a time. Aider is what you would call *Uber for ambulance*. Aider is an app that allows people to take charge of emergency situations and save lives by allowing them to order an ambulance, find out and get directions to hospitals nearby, talk to medical professionals, etc
Priplug is building a central repository of all privacy laws and regulations in the world. A one-stop shop for global privacy laws and regulations. As privacy laws and data regulations are evolving to be a big deal daily, Priplug aims to be the forerunner of this market by putting global laws in the palms of many people at an affordable price.
Business Brace is solving the numerous limitations that small and medium businesses face in accessing support services for non-core business operations. It offers business support in one place ; accounting, human resources, legal, marketing and it services. Through its marketplace, Business Brace seamlessly integrates its support services that is accessed in consolidated dashboards on both mobile and web platforms
Galilee Tech is building the future of legaltech. Easy Filing (still in development phase) is a software that enables a legal practitioner to complete the longer part of filing a court process from the comfort of his/her home without approaching the court except when the need arises, thereby reducing the timeline for filing of court processes and reduction of time in assignment of court cases.
Umscope is an online marketplace for the university community that provides accessibility with convenience to goods and services. Through Umscope, student entrepreneurs can showcase their goods and services on a centralized platform while being empowered as well.
7. Sealed App is an end to end solution that provides specialized affordable and automatic legal services to anyone from the palm of their hand while closing the unemployment gap and solving crucial legal problems.
8. Digi Health is a platform where anyone can easily verify information or outbreak on the health sector. Through the platform, one can access quality healthcare service at the comfort of the home without the need to visit the hospital.Communication with a certified medical physician is either by chat, video or audio call on the web based platform.
9. AnyWork : is a platform for connecting Nigeria’s verified skilled artisans (service providers) with ready and willing service consumers, using geolocation and optimization algorithms to pair service providers and consumers in a manner that generates reliability and cost efficiency.
The winning startup will be awarded $5000 seed capital plus one year free legal support. Startups that come second and third place, will be awarded $2500 and $1500 seed capital respectively and one year of free legal support.
Let me tell you a story. Kaycee had what she thought was the best idea for an app. This idea was going to disrupt the legal profession or so she thought. Let’s call this idea, Uber for Lawyers. The pathway to success was clear; Build the app, connect people and lawyers, make revenue, get funding and then exit in 5 years. (sure way to the soft life as stated in the book of life). Kaycee got her developer friend, Dotun onboard, promised him 40% equity, promised Chika, the designer 10% equity and viola, product development started. After 6 months of back and forth, the product was launched. 2 months after, no lawyer had been ‘ubered‘ on the app. She has been dorimed. Where did she go wrong?
Let’s rewind back a bit….
9 months before product launch, Kaycee was in attendance at a legaltech conference and during one of the sessions, lawyers talked about their challenges, a number of them complained about the difficulty in getting clients. Some of her tech friends also shared with her their difficulty in getting lawyers with certain kinds of transactional experience. Then, Kaycee thought to herself, I can build an app to get clients to Lawyers and vice versa. (talk about aspire to perspire to expire…)
But she forgot something….
Kaycee forgot to talk to the users (Now imagine if Henry Ford had built a faster horse instead of a car…. not so relevant here but you get the point still). She assumed that an app where lawyers could meet clients would solve the problem. 9 months later with a lot of design iterations and time wasting development; the problem was still not solved or maybe it was solved the wrong way or at the wrong time.
Who knows? Well, Kaycee could have known if only she decided to speak to her users and not go ahead to build the product based on her invalidated assumptions.
Dear LegalTech Founder, Here is why you should speak to your users;
Firstly, Your users are the ones with the problem. I know you have heard a couple of founders say that they built a product to solve a problem that they had personally experienced, that is good. However, you should know that they spoke to a lot of more that had the same problem to get a better perspective on how to solve it. Unless you want to build a product that only you will sell, buy and use, you need to understand how your customers actually perceive the problem. You need to know if its a pain point to them or just a by-the-way feeling of inconvenience.
Secondly, It gives you an idea of how your users think they want the problem to be solved. of course, this is not entirely a way of saying you cannot be innovative in building a solution, however, their responses to the solution they think they want will help give your proposed solution a better shape. So, that your users are not asking for A and you are building Z.
Thirdly, More often than not, users don’t just buy the what, they buy the WHY. Talking to your users will help you identify the exact problem you are trying to solve. You will also begin to understand how you can market your product, the value it brings to your users, the benefits of the solution. Like i said, its not the what, is the why.
Fourthly, You want to know if your users are actually doing anything to solve that problem. I know you think your idea is the next best thing to agege bread, but nah, someone else has built the factory. Knowing how your users are solving the problem gives you a perspective on your prospective competitors and how they are solving the problem, just so you don’t reinvent the wheel or maybe you do but in a more innovative way.
Finally, Talk to your users because they are the ones with the problem and will be the one to pay for it when you launch (except if its a pro-bono product and even at that, you still need a means of sustainability). Talking with users and getting their feedback on anything from your random ideas to solving an actual problem before building products will help you build better products / the right product.
When you hear Digilaw, you think about one of the foremost legaltech platforms that became popular for its online learning model. They took digital learning to a new level. Digilaw started actively around early 2019 as an online class for lawyers, majorly through Whatsapp groups. Lawyers and non-lawyers specialized in areas of technology law and emerging technologies were brought onboard to teach other lawyers who were interested in certain areas. Before classes were organised, the founders carried out a survey to find out what the students wanted to learn at the time and found it surprising that more often than not, the students indicated interests in non-legal and tech-focused like software coding, blockchain, cryptocurrency. That’s where the journey began.
Pre-Covid Era…
Before the pandemic, classes moved from Whatsapp groups to zoom, and to other platforms that could host the content after the live classes for those who could not participate in the live classes. Towards the end of 2019, the startup encountered issues and could not keep up with the demand for classes at that point, hence, a decline in the delivery of classes. They went into hibernation in operations, but maintained activity on their social media accounts.
Then the pandemic hit…
I was already in law school when the pandemic hit and we had to go home, and online classes began. Even the law school had to adapt to online classes, though that came with its challenges, especially that of data consumption. Like one class could consume about 200 to 250mb and that was for Monday to Friday, says Akin, one of the co-founders of Digilaw.
A tweet changed the narrative…
Scrolling through the streets of Twitter, Akin saw a tweet from a friend stating that she wished there was a podcast where they could discuss things related to what was being taught in law school and boom that’s when the idea hit, that Digilaw could actually do that. ”I reached out to my partner and she got on board with implementing the idea. We contacted other colleagues who got onboard and two weeks later, we launched”, Akin Agunbiade, one of the founders said.
Getting good reviews on the podcast gave the team the right validation that they were actually onto something and solving a problem, especially for law school students. Listening to the podcast was more convenient and less data consuming (the perfect starter pack for a student). It got a lot more interesting as they also brought in practicing lawyers to talk to topics around Criminal Litigation and Corporate Law Practice on the podcast.
Nine months later, with 50 episodes, 4700 downloads and a sponsor, Digilaw seems to have hacked a different and cheaper way of accessing legal content especially for law students and lawyers alike; legal content simplified on podcasts.
With the level of reception that the content got, Akin decided to start doing a lot more research into podcasting as a business and how it could be used to further the dissemination of legal information as well as creating a platform for aggregating other podcasts. With this model, all that a podcast producer needs to do is create their content while Digilaw handles every other thing, including the design, promotion and hosting of the podcast.
Akin and his co-founder, Keyukemi Ubi were classmates and only started talking to each other after school, in 2019. Keyu was open to the idea from the very beginning and that’s how she got onboard, and since then she has been very valuable to the team. Akin says there is no way he could have learned podcasting without Keyu. In addition to handling the Operations in Digilaw, Keyu is enrolled in the Nigerian University of Technology Management while Akin is focused on the technical side of the podcast and works with Tech Hive Advisory.
Future plans for Digilaw and podcasting…
”The plan is to really explore the business of podcasting. Digilaw has not pivoted from online learning but we are now delivering it differently and making it a lot more open to everyone. . We are taking the knowledge of Nigerian laws across the Atlantic to people who are interested in knowing about our laws. Let’s call it legal knowledge without borders. We intend to work on exploring partnerships and creating platforms that will help Nigerian podcast producers produce, host and monetize their podcast with no hassles”, says Akin.
Legal Zoom’s recent IPO move. On June 29th, LegalZoom, a leading online platform for legal and compliance solutions in the United States, with a goal of democratizing the law announced the pricing of its first public offering (IPO) of some shares of common stock at $28.00 per share to the general public. LegalZoom has also announced the concurrent sale of more shares of its common stock in a private placement to businesses linked with TCV, an existing stockholder, at the same price per share as the initial public offering price. Legalzoom has over 20 years of experience navigating complex regulations and simplifying the legal and compliance process for its customers, and it operates in all 50 states and over 3,000 counties in the United States.
1. The law of defamation protects the reputation of a person from defamatory statements made about him to a third party without lawful justification. A statement is defamatory if it tends to lower the claimant in the estimation of right thinking members of society generally (Sim v Stretch (1936)).
2. A person who publishes a libel knowing it to be false may be sentenced to a fine and a period of imprisonment (Section 4 of the Libel Act 1843). A publisher who did not know a libel was false may also be sentenced to a fine and a sentence of imprisonment (Section 5 of the Libel Act 1843).
3. Copyright does not protect ideas, news or information from being copied. Instead, it protects the material form or manner of expression of that idea or information.
Clio, a cloud-based legal technology business, has become the first global legal tech unicorn, having raised $136 million CAD ($110 million USD) in a Series E round valued at $1.6 billion USD. Clio’s total fundraising to date has been $503 million CAD, with a minor, undisclosed part of secondary capital.
Clio’s mission is to modernize “expensive, obsolete on-premise solutions” with cloud technology that makes managing firms, cases, and clients easier for lawyers. According to the Burnaby, British Columbia-based company, the funding makes it the world’s first legal practice management unicorn. It’s also the second tech startup to achieve unicorn status in Canada with the first being Clearbanc. Finally, according to Jack Newton, the cofounder of Clio, he says, “It’s exciting to see that there’s so much enthusiastic investor support for the vision we have for the future of legal.”
Problem : Before the Twitter Ban in Nigeria, we saw on a daily basis, a report of missing persons, their details and pictures. If you are part of those that still access twitter with a vpn (giving you a side eye), you will still see these tweets. In some cases, the missing persons are found and in some other cases, they are not. Maybe we just don’t get the memo.
Solution : A website or app that curates the list of all missing persons reported on any social media platform or other sources of information and verified by the Police.Where the person is found, the details of such a person is taken off the Missing list or greyed out. I know whospottedme.com does something like this but I wonder if they are still in operation. I also came across Toutiao Xunren from China and Laapata on Google Play.
Westlaw Edge launched a new research tool for legal practitioners that help in identifying weaknesses in the written arguments of the opposing counsel. In other words, Quick Check Contrary Authority Identification (that’s the name of the feature), with the use of Artificial Intelligence, a lawyer is able to analyze and identify relevant authorities omitted from the brief of the opposing counsel.
TWCC : Must-Read Conversations on Law, Tech & Innovation
LexisNexis, has expanded its analytics offering to the Finance space. With the launch of its solution for researching and comparing recent and relevant transactions, finding on-point precedent and clause language, and evaluating specific deal points for more thorough document drafting and more successful negotiations.
Artificial intelligence and related technologies are changing both the law and the legal profession. In particular, technological advances in fields ranging from machine learning to more advanced robots, including sensors, virtual realities, algorithms, bots, drones, self-driving cars, and more sophisticated “human-like” robots are creating new and previously unimagined challenges for regulators. These advances also give rise to new opportunities for legal professionals to make efficiency gains in the delivery of legal services. With the exponential growth of such technologies, radical disruption seems likely to accelerate in the near future.
Artificial Intelligence Law (AI Law) regulates the use and development of artificial intelligence. It is an aspect of and closely related to robot law because smart robots have artificial intelligence built into them. People often mistake the use of AI by lawyers and the impact it has on the legal profession as AI law. But AI Law really refers to the application of the law on AI. There are various aspects to artificial intelligence law including data protection, intellectual property, ethics, politics, social and of course technology. Currently, we all use AI in our daily lives with applications like Siri, video games like Call of Duty, purchase predictors like coupons or advertisements, machine learning, and bots. Many organisations are using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve our lives by developing chatbots to answer people’s questions. AI is making decisions about people, like whether to grant them a loan or finance a vehicle.
Other types of AI include machine learning, bots, and driverless cars. AI has characteristics that enable machines to operate independently of human intervention. These characteristics include reasoning, knowledge, planning, communication, and perception. These characteristics allow them to assist humans by creating easier solutions to everyday tasks.
Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence in Law
Evolution of Robotization : A legion of programmed robots replacing workers at the assembly line has become the most recurring and powerful image when we think of AI. Robotization is already underway, with a lot of companies trying their hands at robots for different purposes. What’s however new is that robots that were hitherto only employed for manual and tedious tasks would now begin to take on semi-skilled and skilled work as well: filling forms, creating reports, making animations, giving instructions etc. In short, from partial automation, we are looking at complete automation by training machines to do the requisite task. In Japan, by 2025, more than 80% of elderly care would be done by robots, not caregivers. This will not only increase efficiency but also give us ample time and energy to focus only on core tasks that require human intelligence.
AI Complementing Lawyers : Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and philanthropist, said last year that AI can be our friend and be beneficial for society. AI has become programmed to help with due diligence, prediction technology, legal analytics, document automation, intellectual property, electronic billing
Predictive Analytics : On the other hand, Casetext’sCARA claims to allow lawyers to forecast an opposing counsel’s arguments by finding opinions that were previously used by lawyers. Users can also detect cases that have been negatively treated and flagged as something that lawyers may deem unreliable.
Litigation Strategy : Ravel Law, is said to be able to identify outcomes based on relevant case law, judge rulings and referenced language from more than 400 courts. The product’s Judge Dashboard feature contains cases, citations, circuits and decisions of a specific judge that is said to aid lawyers in understanding how a judge is likely to rule on a case.The firm’s CEO, Daniel Lewis, affirms such claim in this interview when he explained that the Ravel Law can aid in litigation strategy by providing information on how judges make decisions.
Legal Chatbots : Chatbots are interactive pre-programmed phrases or AI Algorithms that are designed to interact with an audience and assist with a specific function or provide responses to customers via live chat. Although these bots are not as intelligent as a human, they can provide quick responses to queries and help gather information on what a client needs. Asides the usefulness of chatbots to law firms, some organizations have developed pro bono legal bots to assist people who may not otherwise have access to the legal system. For example, a Stanford law graduate developed an online chat bot called DoNotPay that has helped over 160,000 people resolve parking tickets, and is now being expanded to help refugees with their legal problems.
These use cases of Artificial Intelligence in Law are just what it seems to be the early beginnings of a technological disruption to the practice of law, and this will continue to accelerate moving forward. With the adoption of AI in Legal Practice, Most lawyers will be freed from the mundane task of data gathering for the value-added task of analyzing results, thinking, and advising their clients. These are roles that will always require the human touch. AI will now be a tool to help lawyers do all of this better, faster and more cost effectively.
