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Strong legal data is the key to harnessing AI successfully to help legal practice, says Afriwise
Legal data expert Steven de Backer is the founder of Afriwise, the most extensive provider of legal intelligence across Africa. At their 2025 Contributor Briefing he challenged the continent’s legal community to build and maintain the continent’s legal data foundation, in order to reap the benefits of the AI revolution.
While artificial intelligence (AI) tools are transforming many industries globally, including legal practice, their impact and effectiveness in Africa is currently being hampered by the state of the underlying legal data foundation, Afriwise founder and CEO Steven De Backer told leading African law firms at a 2025 Contributor Briefing.
“AI in the practice of law can only help you if it has all the underlying legal data,” said De Backer, who practised as a corporate and technology lawyer across Africa for almost 20 years before establishing Afriwise, a pioneering legal intelligence platform, in 2018. “Without that data, artificial intelligence will simply guess.”
AI’s ability to operate meaningfully in Africa, De Backer said, depends entirely on whether African laws are structured, consolidated, and machine-readable.
South African lawyer Louis Stroebel, who recently won the Global Innovator Award at the AGA Excellence Awards 2025 in Toronto, for his work on CortixaAI, a ground-breaking legal AI platform, agrees that the quality of underlying data is vital.
Speaking with Africa Legal following his award win, Stroebel, the Managing Partner of SST Attorneys in Pretoria and Sasolburg, shared how he and a team of lawyers, bankers, software developers, and IT security specialists created CortixaAI, a high-level AI-powered legal drafting tool for mid-sized law firms that utilises the firm’s own legal precedents and other documentation in creating draft contracts.
To get quality outputs from AI tools, you need curated, quality inputs, said Stroebel, who created CortixaAI to avoid issues with hallucinations or LLM risks and errors.
Similarly, De Backer in his briefing with leading African law firms last week, underlined that AI is becoming core legal infrastructure, but many African jurisdictions face a fundamental barrier, with their legal data foundation not yet in a state that AI can learn from. Countries such as Kenya and South Africa with well-maintained, high quality public legal data are positioned to benefit first, whereas other nations risk falling behind unless the continent acts decisively.
“If the future of legal work is built on data and generative AI, then Africa must make sure its legal frameworks are part of the dataset,” shared De Backer, following the Contributor Briefing. “Where our legal data isn’t structured or accessible, the gaps will be filled by AI with assumptions, often wrong, often borrowed from other jurisdictions. If African data is thin or absent, Africa will miss the boat on legal AI.”
Africa has legal talent in abundance, noted De Backer, but without structured, quality legal data, AI tools default to generic information, putting entire jurisdictions at risk of becoming ‘blind spots’ in the world’s emerging AI-driven legal systems.
The competitive gap of the future does not come from AI itself, or from legal skills, stressed De Backer, but from the data AI needs.
Africa’s future will be shaped by the strength of its data. With AI rapidly redefining legal practice worldwide, building a structured, reliable legal data layer is no longer optional; it is the foundation that will determine whether African jurisdictions can fully benefit from this new era.
“But here’s the opportunity: Africa still has time to shape this,” said De Backer. “We are early enough in legal AI adoption to build the legal data foundations. The challenge is real but we need to ensure that the legal industry in Africa will have the same capabilities as global firms in the future. We have the opportunity to ensure this by building the legal data layer now. This is one of those moments where we either step forward or risk surrendering the competitive edge that legal AI is already creating.”
Read more about the huge potential De Backer sees for legal data in Africa in our feature on “Harnessing legal intelligence” here, and more about Stroebel winning the Global Innovator Award for his work on CortixaAi, in our news story here.