The NBA Section on Business Law (NBA-SBL) opened its 20th Annual International Business Law Conference in Abuja with a pre-conference exclusive masterclass themed, “Upskilling and Upscaling for Legal Professionals,” comprising three sessions designed to equip delegates with the practical skills, commercial insight and strategic frameworks required to navigate an increasingly complex legal and business landscape.
Before the conference turned to policy reform and sectoral analysis, the opening day focused on the fundamentals of modern legal practice: negotiation, business development, and the technological disruption reshaping the profession.
The first session, themed “Negotiation Strategies: Master Adversarial and Non-Adversarial Dispute Management,” was led by Ayuli Jemide, Lead Partner at Detail Commercial Solicitors. He stated that people account for approximately 70 per cent of all negotiation outcomes, not facts, legal position, or strategy.
The session examined 12 factors that shape negotiation decisions, including anchoring, time pressure, venue, scarcity, and reciprocity, and demonstrated through real transactions that the human variable is consistently decisive. According to the speaker, measured vulnerability often builds stronger trust than displays of confidence alone. Delegates were encouraged to prepare thoroughly by researching counterparts before meetings, identifying areas of common interest early, asking questions that reveal underlying motivations, and avoiding the tendency to seek excessive validation.
A session on business development and networking, facilitated by Abena Poku, Marketing and BD Director at Aluko & Oyebode, addressed a gap the legal profession rarely acknowledges openly: clients assume technical competence, and what determines who gets the work is relationship, trust, and a demonstrated understanding of the client’s specific situation.
The session, themed “Business Development: Learn Proven Techniques for Client Retention and Practice Growth,” also featured Andrew Skipper, former Head of Africa at a major international law firm, and Toyin Ojo of the African Legal Support Facility. Ms Poku noted that AI tools now use LinkedIn content to rank lawyers and law firms in search results, making consistent content production a commercial imperative rather than an optional visibility exercise.
Drawing on principles of network science, Mr Skipper stated that effective networking is a strategic, learnable skill. He explained that opportunities often emerge through broader professional connections, well-positioned networks and intentional relationship building. He also added that Nigerian lawyers are uniquely positioned to play a central role in the growing volume of cross-border African transactions and should take greater advantage of that position.
Ms Ojo spoke from the client side, offering direct advice on what separates winning proposals from losing ones: leading with the client’s needs rather than the firm’s credentials, providing value the client did not know it needed, and demonstrating a partnership orientation rather than a transactional one.
A session on Artificial Intelligence in the Future of Legal Business and Services, led by Ope Olugasa, Managing Director of LawPavilion Business Solutions, examined six disruptions AI is introducing: due diligence and document review, contract generation and redlining, legal research, the billable hour model, law firm structure, and competitive advantage.
AI is already compressing work that previously took 20 hours into approximately two, fundamentally breaking the billable hour as a revenue model and requiring a shift to value-based pricing. He noted that the traditional law firm pyramid is giving way to a diamond model in which technology replaces the base of junior generalist work, with significant consequences for how the profession trains its next generation.
The speaker warned that firms generating identical outputs from the same AI tools will compete only on price in a commoditised market, and that the only sustainable differentiator is proprietary institutional knowledge built into a firm’s own AI systems over time.
He identified cognitive offloading, transferring reasoning to AI rather than developing it, as the most serious long-term risk to the profession, and closed with the observation that technology does not retire lawyers; it retires the lawyer who thought lawyering was only the work the machine now does.
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