Ten startups out of 82 that applied in the Justice Tech NG Hackathon and Accelerator 2025 have emerged winners of the second round of the initiative by the Federal Government.
The programme, organized by the office of the Special Assistant to the President on Justice Sector Reform and ICT/Digital and innovative Technology was principally designed to allow innovators pitch for ideas on how to improve the practice in Nigeria’s legal system with technology.
For decades, the Nigerian legal system had struggled under the weight of bureaucracy, with mountains of paperwork, case backlogs, detentions in police cells without trials, manual recording of court proceedings, missing files and delayed justice.
The concept of the Hackathon is therefore is to manage legal processes with technology and initiate ideas on how to use technology to simply legal system to make judicial process seamless and enthrone public trust in the system.
The ten winners will go into the next competitive phase and top three will emerge winners. The first wins N10 m, N5 m of it is in cash and the remaining is in kind in terms of office space and other resources; the second winner gets N7 million and N4 out of it will be in cash; and the third winner will win N5 m and N3m of it in cash.
Speaking at the innovators pitch in Lagos, Tsedaqah Fernandez, Special Assistant on Justice Reform and ICT/Digital Innovative Technology to President Tinubu further explained that the JusticeNG Tech Hackathon is about finding local solutions to local problem.
He said he encourages startups on how they can get into the legal justice market to improve it, address challenges and close gaps when a culprit is arrested and when he/she is taken to court
One of the ten winners, PocketLawyers’ pitch centered on building digital presence for lawyers. Under its platform, “lawyers will have digital presence and be able to have access to more clients while they are serving their existing clients with all the tools that they need”, Ngozi Nwbueze, CEO and founder Pocketlawyers who came first with her idea told BusinessDay
On how her idea would help legal y system, she said “because we are digitising the law firm system, that would help reduce the cost of legal services” as lawyers can have digital presence instead of physical offices which will translate to affordable services”.
Others presented ideas on how to connect lawyers to clients, simplify court recording proceedings and digitize detentions in police cells to enable identification of persons and allowing lawyers and NGOs become interested in some cases.
Announcing the result, Olayinka Faji, administrative Judge of the Federal High Court, Lagos division who was the head of the jurors said he was impressed by the idea’s focus on how to make legal practice more accessible. He said “law and order are vital to the system. If we want to encourage FDIs, the court system must be top notch”, he said.
He recognized the introduction of tech in legal system as important. He also said that the purpose of the Hackathon is to discover and encourage talents that will move the judiciary and the economy. “If we get the law and justice sector working, we have solved 60 % of our problems”, he said.
