LAGOS — LawPavilion Business Solutions has unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered citation checker and document review tool designed to help Nigerian lawyers detect fabricated, inaccurate or irrelevant legal authorities in court documents and legal opinions.
The company also announced the integration of the 70-volume Sasegbon’s Laws of Nigeria, covering Nigerian case law from 1957 to 2026, into its LawPavilion Prime and Primsol platforms.
The developments were unveiled at a press conference following the company’s product showcase at the 66th Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Annual General Conference.
Managing Director of LawPavilion Business Solutions, Ope Olugasa, said the innovations were developed against the backdrop of the growing use of general-purpose artificial intelligence in legal practice and the attendant risk of “hallucinated” authorities.
Olugasa said the problem had become increasingly significant as lawyers, clients and other legal practitioners turn to AI tools for research, drafting and analysis.
He said: “Legal knowledge is now being audited, silently, daily, against AI.”
According to him, the implication is that lawyers must now contend not only with clients who have access to AI-generated legal opinions but also with the possibility of inaccurate authorities finding their way into professional documents.
He explained that LawPavilion AI differs from general-purpose AI systems because it is grounded in the company’s Nigerian legal database and designed with safeguards to reduce the risk of fabricated legal responses.
The citation-checking capability enables a lawyer to upload a legal document and verify its citations, including whether the cited authority exists and whether it actually supports the proposition for which it was cited.
Olugasa illustrated the capability with a scenario in which a lawyer receives a sophisticated legal opinion containing several authorities.
He said the document could be submitted to LawPavilion Document Review, which would analyse the citations and indicate which authorities exist and whether they address the legal issue in dispute.
“That is the difference between being questioned by AI and being vindicated by it,” he said.
The company also unveiled upgraded Legal Analytics & Insights, designed to help practitioners assess the strength of legal doctrines by examining supporting and conflicting authorities as well as judicial trends.
Another product, CaseManager, has also been enhanced with an agentic AI assistant covering diary management, workflow, matter overview and law firm revenue visibility.
Sasegbon’s Laws of Nigeria integrated
A major component of the announcement was the integration of Sasegbon’s Laws of Nigeria into LawPavilion Prime and Primsol.
The 70-volume legal encyclopedia, which spans seven decades of Nigerian jurisprudence, will be searchable alongside LawPavilion’s case law and legislation libraries and complemented by its Legal Analytics platform.
Olugasa described the integration as a combination of established legal knowledge and modern technology, giving practitioners access to a wider body of Nigerian legal authorities within a single research environment.
He said the objective was to reduce the time lawyers spend searching across multiple sources and enable them to focus more on legal strategy and judgment.
“Let trusted AI carry the linear,” he said, “so you are freed for the lateral.”
Olugasa distinguished between linear legal work, such as research, document review and citation verification, and lateral thinking, which involves strategy, judgment and identifying arguments, risks and opportunities.
According to him, reducing the burden of repetitive legal work would allow lawyers to devote more time to higher-level professional judgment.
LawPavilion Elite targets institutional knowledge loss
LawPavilion also introduced LawPavilion Elite, an enterprise platform designed to enable law firms, corporate legal departments and Ministries of Justice to preserve and deploy institutional legal knowledge through customised AI.
The platform allows organisations to build an AI system around their own documents, precedents and standard operating procedures rather than relying solely on general-purpose AI systems.
Olugasa said the platform was designed to address the loss of institutional knowledge that often occurs when experienced lawyers leave an organisation.
He said organisations could use the technology to ensure that their associates and legal teams continued to work with the institution’s established standards and precedents.
“Leadership in law isn’t about knowing everything,” Olugasa said. “It’s about being able to reach everything, instantly.”
He said LawPavilion Elite brings together an e-library, customised AI and case-management capabilities in a unified subscription environment.
Security, confidentiality
Addressing concerns about the security of sensitive legal information, Olugasa said data protection and confidentiality were treated as core design principles of the company’s technology.
He listed authorised-device access restrictions, administrative controls for deactivating accounts when personnel leave an organisation, data anonymisation and encryption among measures incorporated into the solutions.
He added that the systems were designed to support compliance with applicable data-protection requirements.
The company also disclosed that it has solutions for in-house legal departments, including a Contract and Compliance Management System for managing contracts, cases, correspondence with external solicitors, board activities and other legal obligations from a single interface.
Olugasa said the objective was to give corporate legal leadership greater visibility over matters being handled across different locations or by multiple external counsel.
‘AI will raise the bar for lawyers’
On concerns that AI could diminish creativity among lawyers, Olugasa compared the development to the emergence of calculators in mathematics.
He argued that rather than making professionals less capable, technology could remove repetitive tasks and enable them to concentrate on more sophisticated forms of reasoning.
He said the same principle could apply to legal practice, with AI handling repetitive or linear tasks while lawyers focus on strategy, judgment and problem-solving.
“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.”
The company said the latest products form part of an expanding LawPavilion ecosystem comprising LawPavilion AI, Legal Analytics & Insights, CaseManager, LawPavilion Elite and Sasegbon’s Laws of Nigeria.
The complete Sasegbon integration is available to existing LawPavilion subscribers at an additional N90,000 during the conference, after which the price will rise to N150,000.
LawPavilion also announced a collaboration with AG Mortgage Bank to provide mortgage packages for law firms, branches and groups subscribing collectively.
