Uganda Law Society

President's Message

WELCOME REMARKS BY THE ULS PRESIDENT AT THE INAUGURAL LAW, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION COLLOQUIUM 19–20 OCTOBER 2017

The Hon. Attorney General, The Hon. The Principal Judge, Hon Justice Geoffrey Kiryabwire, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
A good morning to you all.

It is indeed a pleasure to welcome all of you to the inaugural Law, Technology and Innovations Colloquium 2017. I take this opportunity to thank Signum Advocates together with the ULS for conceptualizing and organizing this very important and timely colloquium. Let me state in opening that am very proud of law firms like Signum who have seen open spaces in our legal field and seized the opportunities.

The colloquium comes at a very important tipping time when the following key developments that are not showing signs of slowing down and are taking place at accelerated pace;

The rise of Artificial Intelligence and difficult conversations on issues such as whether a robot can practice law;
The increase in the E Discovery and the increasing role of technology in delivering of judicial services;
Rise of predictive coding in litigation;
Development in legal research and the development of technology that can read a billion documents in a second;
The proliferation of additional providers of legal services (whether individuals or e commerce platforms) and whether they can be regulated in public interest and if so how?

All these indicate that there is a significant human angle to the power of technology. There are fears that technology’s impact on the future of work may relegate several human skills to oblivion or redundancy. These fears in my view will only take place when we fail to re-imagine re-engineer and leverage technology enabled learning opportunities to thrive in the disruption caused by technology.

The two day rich program will no doubt spark and stimulate a chain of focused thoughts in guiding us to unravel the mysteries of legal innovations for posterity.
For us at ULS this conference is once gain an opportunity to point the legal profession to the future. We have amazing speakers and we have also invited key leaders in Government to enable us dialogue on the issues. With rising unemployment of the youth, am particularly concerned about how we can position the Ugandan legal profession to benefit from the 3 billion dollar legal process outsourcing industry.

US President John F Kennedy said that “Change is the law of life. And those who look only the past and present are certain to miss the future.”
Let us forget about the fears of technology but let us purpose like the Estonians are doing to use technology to augment our lawyering.

Wish you a wonderful colloquium.