The LawPavilion Chronicles: Unveiling our Decade of Achievements – Part One

“Are you joking? Which judge do you want to appear before that you will be citing from an electronic law report? Can you imagine doing that before Justice Lagbaja of Tamedun jurisdiction? She will chase you out of her court to go and get the established and traditional law reports that we are all used to. You people are just wasting your time with this your LawPavilion, no Judge will allow it much less allow Counsel to cite it in open court or written address.”

So we were told a decade ago, that is 521 weeks, or 87,672 hours, or 5,260,320 minutes, or 315,619,200 seconds, at our first ever commercial outing at the Ilorin NBA-AGC in 2007. At that time, we took that feedback on the chin and dug in our heels to pursue our dream of doing something new in legal services industry in Nigeria. How thrilling it is for us here at LawPavilion that as we count down to the 2017 NBA-AGC, we can count our blessings of which you have been the biggest and best.

As a fitting tribute to you, we thought it a good idea to look through our journey together over the past 10 years. It doesn’t matter if you just signed up for our services last week, you are an integral part of our success and we want to look through our DECADE OF ACHIEVEMENTS together as we match together towards the next decade.

In 2007, we launched and unveiled the first LawPavilion electronic law reports. At that time, search could only be conducted online as that was what the available technology made possible then. The reports were in Word version and were at best a rudimentary attempt to make law reports portable. But it could not be installed on individual devices like we have it today. It was purely an online research tool.

However, by the NBA-AGC 2008, we had done more work to take LawPavilion from being a mere online law report to being installable on the Windows operating system (OS) but internet access was still required to conduct searches. We had also increased our collection from only Supreme Court judgments to incorporate judgments from the Court of Appeal.

By the time we came to Lagos in 2009 for the NBA-AGC, we had listened to and worked on your feedback about low internet penetration. LawPavilion version 3.0 was unveiled and now searches could be conducted locally on individual devices, thereby achieving our set objective of portability and ease of use for Nigerian legal practitioners and Judges. It was indeed a break-through landmark for us as a Company as the local search brought results from both Supreme Court and Court of Appeal decisions.

In 2010, we thought we had finally reached the peak of our innovative approach to developing your beloved LawPavilion with the release of version 4.0 at the Kaduna Conference. This was the version that came with a highly enhanced search engine and user interface. It was also the version that birthed the introduction of PAGINATED AND PARAGRAPHED Law reports. We also worked significantly on security and instalment payment to ease acquisition of the product.

By the time visitors to our exhibition stand that year realised we had LawPavilion in standalone E-books that was paginated and paragraphed, we knew we were on to something superb. There was no stopping us as we also released the iPad version at that Conference.

Just thinking about how far we have come truly gladdens the heart and shows that the legal services industry in Nigeria has come a very long way in terms of adoption of technology.

With the introduction of the iPad version, the Judiciary beckoned to us! In 3 years, we had succeeded in a paradigm shift emanating from the highest echelon of the legal services industry. We were beyond excited at the turn of events from when we were taunted and advised to stop pursuing a fleeting dream. Today, we are so grateful to all those who believed enough in us to join us in “losing sight of the shore so we could explore new oceans”.

What now happened in 2011?…To be continued.