Guardian

OVER 35 heads of law schools drawn from various countries across the world began brainstorming Monday in Enugu on ways to strengthen legal education within the African region to meet the needs of global legal services and standard.

The two-day event, being hosted by the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), is under the auspices of the International Association of Law Schools (IALS).

Declaring the event open, President of IALS and Emeritus Dean of Kenneth Wang School of Law, Soochow University, China, Prof. Francis S.L. Wang, said that globalisation has emphasised the urgent need to benchmark African legal education with the global best, in order to ensure that the African lawyer does not fall too far behind his global peer.

Wang said that legal education has come under serious pressure at the moment following concerns about the quality of law graduates being churned out by institutions, stressing that the forum would further provide opportunity for collaboration among schools on ways to improve the system.

He disclosed that the choice of UNN for the forum was based on the institution’s leading role in the development and training of lawyers, adding that as a foremost institution in Law education in Nigeria, its products have always been a point of reference in Law education in Africa.

For the Director General, Nigerian Law School, Abuja, Dr. Tahir Mamman, the forum provided opportunity for regional groups to discuss issues pertaining to legal education within the context of their regions and needs.

He said: “There is a huge pressure on legal education in terms of globalisation and the demands of lawyers to meet the needs of global legal services.”

There is also “the problems of unemployment of law graduates and, even more seriously, the issue of quality of lawyers we churn out to provide legal services for Nigerians and wherever they find themselves and other issues that require cross-border expansions.”

Meanwhile, in a lecture entitled: “Legal Education in Africa in the 21st Century and the Challenge of Globalisation,” a professor at Oxford University and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Prof. Fidelis Oditah, said that though a number of African countries was witnessing unprecedented economic, social, political, technological changes and foreign direct investments, these changes, which ordinarily should increase demands for legal services and employment opportunities for law graduates in Africa, have not been so.

He said that involvement of African lawyers in top end legal services arising in Africa was relatively insufficient, lamenting that global law firms were coming into Africa to take up the most lucrative commercial works.

“The position is worse in the case of investment arbitration,” he noted. “International businesses take their English or United States’ law firms with them wherever they go for business. Since many of the projects in Africa are funded from the European or U.S. financial markets, it is inevitable that the funders come to the table with their own lawyers.”

Central to the challenge for legal education in Africa presently was to adapt sufficiently to respond to the needs of the consumers in a globalised legal services market, he said, and to ensure that lawyers produced by African law schools could compete with the global best in terms of legal education knowledge, skill, research, analysis and presentation.

Oditah suggested that the content of what the universities teach, why they should teach what, and how those things are taught, should be defined and specified. More so, in order to compete in the global legal services market, African law firms must begin to make significant investments in their professional businesses and materially increase capacity.

Earlier, the UNN Vice Chancellor, Prof. Barth Okolo, said the institution had remained in the forefront of training of law graduates in the over 50 years of its establishment. He challenged the forum to come up with workable ideas on how to improve standards and make African law graduates the best worldwide.