Prof. Ernest Kofi Abotsi, Dean of University of Professional Studies (UPSA) School of Law, and a member of the Governing Council of the African Bar Association has challenged the African Bar Association to develop and promote the collection of data of legal practice on and across the African Continent.

Prof. Abotsi made this challenge in a speech at the 2024 African Bar Association Annual conference in Zambia. He was speaking on the topic "Building Commercial Competitive Firms in Africa in the Age of the AfCFTA". The respected Professor of Law prior to making the call indicated the dominance and pervasiveness of commercial law practice on the African Legal Landscape and bemoaned the slowness of law firms on the continent to position themselves to exploit the opportunities connected with the Continent wide Trade Agreement, AfCFTA.

Recent trends of Cross-Border Practice

Prof. Abotsi indicated that free market economies spurning economic growth, commercial ventures and transactions in Africa has resulted in growth in profits which profits have largely gone to firms and practitioners outside the African Continent, mainly in the West. He however indicated changes in this trend where "there is a generational shift in the outlook of legal practice in which the average lawyer today wants to benefit commercially from the free market economies and reforms that have been going on in Africa for the latter part of nearly three decades"

Despite bemoaning the dominance of foreign firms in large scale transactions in the African Continent, the lifetime member of the Governing Council of the African Bar Association, Prof Abosi, also pointed to increasing cross-border referrals, transactional coordination, local content partnership amongst law firms, joint bidding initiatives inter alia as indicators of positive developments of cross-border legal practice on the African Continent.

Africa Legal Practice Statistics

As part of his critique of African Lawyers of local mindedness of legal practice where by the average African lawyer is minded by practice just at home and not beyond National borders, the Law Professor, Prof. Ernest Kofi Abotsi indicated that there are no statistics of Legal Practice in Africa while there is sufficient collection and analysis of legal practice data in the West. Prof Abotsi indicated the annual turnover of legal practice in America and Europe running into billions of dollars with no records of same nature for African Firms.

He thus challenged the African Bar Association to spearhead the collection of such vital data for knowledge in cross-border practice and experience to be documented and shared. "Why don't we have facts and figures on the practice of law in Africa?...We must know the annual turnover of legal practice in Africa and we must be interested in the annual turnover of legal practice in our various countries", Prof. Abotsi added.

Watch excerpts of his speech below: