LawPavilion Business Solutions has unveiled new artificial intelligence-powered tools aimed at helping Nigerian lawyers improve legal research, verify authorities and manage legal knowledge as AI adoption continues to reshape the profession.
The technology company announced the integration of Sasegbon’s Laws of Nigeria into its LawPavilion Prime and Primsol platforms, alongside an AI-powered Citation Checker and Document Review capability, upgraded Legal Analytics & Insights, an enhanced CaseManager and LawPavilion Elite.
The products were unveiled by Ope Olugasa, managing director of LawPavilion Business Solutions, at a press conference following the company’s product showcase at the 66th Nigerian Bar Association Annual General Conference.
According to Olugasa, the new capabilities are designed to help lawyers move beyond the routine aspects of legal research and document review, allowing them to devote more time to strategy, judgment and complex legal reasoning.
He identified the increasing risk of AI-generated or fabricated legal authorities, commonly referred to as AI hallucinations, as one of the major challenges confronting the legal profession.
“Legal knowledge is now being audited, silently, daily, against AI,” Olugasa said, explaining that lawyers increasingly face clients, directors and other stakeholders who use general-purpose AI tools to scrutinise legal advice.
He said the challenge was also commercial, as the growing accessibility of general-purpose AI to clients could diminish the perceived value of legal services where the work delivered by a lawyer is indistinguishable from what a client can generate independently using AI.
A key feature of the new offering is LawPavilion’s AI-powered Document Review and Citation Checker, which allows practitioners to submit legal documents and verify the authorities cited in them.
The tool checks whether cited authorities exist and whether they actually address the legal issues for which they have been cited.
Olugasa illustrated the application with a scenario involving a corporate counsel who receives a legal opinion containing several citations. The document can be submitted to LawPavilion Document Review, which then analyses the citations and identifies whether the authorities are both authentic and relevant to the issue under consideration.
He said the capability could help lawyers respond more confidently to AI-generated or poorly researched legal arguments.
The citation checker sits within LawPavilion AI, which the company says is designed specifically for legal work and grounded in authoritative Nigerian legal sources rather than the open internet.
Olugasa said the increasing volume of research, document review and citation verification required of lawyers could limit the time available for strategic thinking.
He distinguished between “linear thinking”, involving the structured process of evaluating facts, identifying legal issues and applying rules and precedent, and “lateral thinking”, which involves approaching problems from unexpected but effective angles.
According to him, lawyers derive much of their professional value from the latter, particularly their ability to identify risks, opportunities and arguments that may not be immediately obvious.
“The sheer volume of linear work is crowding out the capacity for lateral brilliance,” he said, adding that trusted AI could take on repetitive tasks and give lawyers more time for higher-level legal reasoning.
LawPavilion also positioned its Elite platform as an answer to the fragmentation of legal technology, where firms may have to subscribe to multiple products to manage different aspects of their operations.
Olugasa described LawPavilion Elite as an integrated environment bringing together an electronic library, customised AI and case management capabilities under a single subscription.
The company is also extending its technology offerings to corporate legal departments through its Contract and Compliance Management System.
The system is designed to allow in-house legal teams to manage contracts, cases and their status, correspondence with external solicitors, board activities and other legal responsibilities through a single interface.
Olugasa said the solution could provide legal leaders with greater visibility where companies have matters being handled across different locations or by multiple external counsel.
Addressing concerns that greater reliance on AI could reduce creativity and ingenuity among lawyers, Olugasa compared the development to the adoption of calculators in education.
He argued that although calculators initially raised concerns about their potential effect on mathematical ability, they ultimately enabled people to spend less time on calculations that could be automated and more time on higher-level mathematical reasoning.
He said the same principle could apply to legal practice, with AI handling repetitive tasks while lawyers focus on more sophisticated analysis and decision-making.
“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.”
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