Legal Innovation Enables Access

Blogger Rian Hancock is a South African lawyer who runs his own consultancy, Eclipse NewLaw, focusing on legal operations and legal technology.

Welcome to the Africa Legal innovation blog where we will encourage debate on all legal innovations and technology including looking at the companies making waves, the countries where it’s working well and the people driving the transformation agenda.

Many countries in Africa are reaping enormous benefits from the application of innovative legal delivery options, usually underpinned with effective technology which could be exponentially expounded by sharing collective knowledge and collaboration.

So, the focus of this blog is to inform and explore how legal innovation and technology can underpin the development of legal services across the continent. We will look at locally-developed solutions that solve problems unique to a community, the ethics around legal technology and discuss the implementation challenges faced in some regions.

We will bring you the views of Africa-based experts as well as global insights that give context to many of the issues being faced. We will look at different technologies and use case-studies to illustrate where these work well.

You may not always agree and, when you don’t, tell us. We want to challenge the status quo to drive change and improvement. Interviews already lined up include global legal outsourcing guru, Mark Ross and legal ops experts Mark A Cohen. We will also be chatting to local experts such as E-Discovery pioneer Terry Harrison and justice crusader Jackie Nagtegaal. The aim is to give you global and local insights into legal innovation and legal technology, helping you distill the quagmire which is the future of legal services.

We will connect our community of lawyers, in-house counsel and legal consultants to enable a sharing of ideas, insights, best practices, successes and failures in innovative legal solutions and legal technology.

The underlying theme will be how to use the innovative legal solutions and tech to access justice, remove barriers and provide solutions.

Africa Legal | Legal Technology Survey 2019

Africa Legal is conducting groundbreaking new research into the current realities and future potential of technology in the African legal sector. If you are involved with your organisation's purchase, or use, of legal technology we want to hear from you. Take our 5 minute survey here