 Your Excellency the Governor of Iquiti State, Chief Afeba Balola OFR, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Founder and Chancellor of the Afeba Balola University, the President of the Nigeria Bar Association, Mr. Ullumidea Quata, Learned Senior Advocates and other Learned Colleagues, the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Distinguished Members of the Faculty, Honoured Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, let me begin by thanking the Nigeria Bar Association and the Afeba Balola University for providing the platform for this important reflection on legal education in Nigeria. We must also specially commend Chief Afeba Balola, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, who will be 93 years old in October, but remains an undiminished light in the legal profession. That he has devoted his resources to establishing a world-class university and a faculty of law that has attained such distinction in a few short years is truly remarkable and worthy of praise. The theme itself, reimagining legal education in Nigeria, has encapsulated the mood of stakeholders in the legal profession as the current state of legal education in the country and the need for reevaluation, revamping and transformation. Over the years, we have witnessed how other nations have transformed their systems of legal training through developed structures of periodic review. They have recognised that first legal minds must be developed for analytical and critical thinking. That this type of education does not have to be confined to the traditional four walls of a classroom, a system which we have been operating in the main since the 1960s. Legal education, like many other branches of learning, is designed to evolve and be responsive to developments in society. The need for legal services depend on the general dealings and operations of the society. Having been a law teacher for some years, I fully understand that a major problem of our style of legal education is learning by rote, as opposed to learning for problem-solving. In the latter, that is learning for problem-solving, the emphasis is not in memorising case law and statutes, but in understanding how to use them to solve real-life legal problems. I taught the law of evidence at the University of Lagos and at a couple of other universities, and it struck me one day while teaching documentary evidence that students will learn faster if I was able to give them copies of what an original document is, what secondary evidence of it would look like, and what a real-life public document is, and what a certified copy looks like. So that when I taught the complex issues of proof of documentary evidence, they already had a good mental picture of what I had in mind. Also, by posing a problem and asking them to search out the rules to apply, I found that even the least interested students got involved. This is a snippet of what is called clinical legal education, and it is the new and right way of teaching law. The next question for me is how to deal with a growing number of students, especially in the law school, where we have the population explosion, overcrowded classrooms, overcrowded hostels, inadequate library facilities, a limited pool of qualified law teachers, among others. But these problems are not peculiar to our own jurisdiction. Other jurisdictions have encountered these same problems, of course, in varying degrees, and successfully tackled them. Nigeria's candidates for law school averaged about 10,000. A 10-year review of the admission list of the Nigerian law school from 2010 to 2020 shows that, on the average, various campuses of the school can accommodate only about 6,000 students, and yet we have about 10,000 students. In the United States of America, from 2015 to 2017, between 16,000 and 20,000 lawyers joined the pool annually. Similarly, high numbers are trained in the United Kingdom, about 21,000 lawyers trained annually, and in Australia, about 8,499,000 trained annually. But what do these countries do differently? What do they do differently from us, despite the fact that we also share in the large numbers that they train? The first is the decentralization of law schools and non-residential bar examinations. As of 2020, there were somewhere in the order of about 202 American bar stations fully accredited faculties of law. Now, after the award of the JD, that is the Juris Doctor degree, which is roughly equivalent to the LLB, candidates engage in private preparations, which is called the bar review, for the bar examinations set by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, and administered by agencies under the authority of state supreme courts. Now, there are no requirements for residential stay in any formal school setting for the bar examinations. Applications are completed online, and the examinations are computer-based, and they are administered at designated centers. A character and fitness investigation is conducted on applicants, prior to issuance of a license to practice law. The second is that all of these other jurisdictions have a long period of practical training, as conditional precedent for the call to the bar. Our profession is called the practice of law, for a reason. Whether the focus of a lawyer is advocacy or solicitors work, mastery of the intricacies of the profession comes with the practice, which is greatly enhanced by training under established mentors. While in Nigeria, students are exposed to barely two months of both court and law office training before call. In other jurisdictions, practical training takes anywhere between 12 and 24 months. In Singapore, for example, qualified persons who pass the written examinations will need a 12-month training contract before they can obtain a practicing license, before they can obtain a practicing license. In the United Kingdom, candidates undergo mandatory 12-month pupillage for aspiring baristas and a 24-month training contract for aspiring solicitors. The third is the extensive use of technology for teaching, even before the advent of COVID-19, which in a number of countries fast-tracked the adoption of technology in teaching. Other jurisdictions had adopted and institutionalized the use of technology in tutoring, in examinations, and even in their courtroom systems. The fourth is the inclusion of relevant aspects of managerial skills in the curriculum. Legal education must be socially relevant and economically profitable for the practitioners. Law, even in the context of offering pro bono services, is a business. Managers of such businesses are expected to be fully equipped with not only practical legal skills, but also with some business and management skills. To be effective, the pedagogy must reflect these realities and the changing demographics of people joining the profession. Several UK universities now offer a law and business or a law and management science degree. Some take a period of four years to enable the student get a qualifying degree in law and a regular law degree and a business degree. I think this summit offers a unique opportunity for more in-depth introspection on relevant contemporary curriculum for both the law degree and bar qualification. I must commend the leadership of Niger Embassiation for their consistent efforts at improving the legal profession through sustained investments in continuing legal education, in particular, and of course, the advancement also of jurisprudence in general. I wish you all very successful deliberations, and I look forward to receiving the recommendations of the summit. Thank you very much for your attention.