Technology And The Future Of Legal Practice In Nigeria By Justice Olatokunbo Majekodunmi

Technology offers tremendous opportunities for crime investigation, information gathering, intelligence gathering, etc. Technology is available today by which you can bounce off a light beam from the window pane of a house, capture and record the conversation that goes on within the house. Technology helps in the gathering of new and different kinds of information to document crime or violations, especially from areas that are insecure and inaccessible. The internet and mobile communications networks are also increasing the conduits along which information and communication flow. Almost every aspect of human lives is now influenced by technology.

A recent instance is the intelligence gathering by Turkish Government of information surrounding the alleged assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on 2nd October, 2018. Khashoggi was last seen on CCTV arriving the consulate at 13.14 local time for an appointment. Turkish officials also claim to have CCTV footage of the movement of each member of the group they believed carried out the assassination

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The benefits of technology to the human race cannot be overemphasized. It is however necessary to also highlight the inherent dangers in technology when it is not well-regulated by law. Just as technology is advancing, the perpetrators of crime are also not static in the deployment of technology to their trade. They are very sophisticated in cyber technology and cybercrime. 

For instance, just as technology can now be readily utilized to find the location of a crime suspect, technology is also available that allows a proxy server to be used to bounce signals around so it does not show a person’s exact location. Thus, a person might be in Asia while he would appear to be communicating from Africa. Similarly, getting eyewitness technology has been made easy but equally so is the manipulation of it, such as in the case of photoshopping. Digital images are easily manipulated and therefore can amount to inherently unreliable evidence. The characters of persons are being assassinated or defamed on the various blogs under the guise of passing commentaries.

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The fast pace of technology development presents challenges to the legal practice in Nigeria to keep up with the technologies. All identified stakeholders need to evolve legal concepts adequate to deal with new scientific phenomena. The gains of technology are huge and the potential of a more robust future for the legal practice in Nigeria is greater.

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