Access to justice: Law Professor advocates for creation of national legal portal
He is particularly calling for the creation of a single national legal portal with a supporting app, that will provide access to “Ghanaian laws, judicial decisions and relevant information on access to justice.”
Professor Richard Frimpong Oppong, a law professor at the Califonia Western School of Law and a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, is advocating for investments in justice technology.
He is particularly calling for the creation of a single national legal portal with a supporting app, that will provide access to “Ghanaian laws, judicial decisions and relevant information on access to justice.”
While legal tech companies like DennisLaw Ghana currently provide such services, he noted that those were on a commercial basis.
“Direct government involvement in justice technology is necessary,” he said.
He, therefore, indicated that funding for the project should come from the government and members of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA).
Noting examples in the US and British Columbia, he said interest on funds deposited by lawyers and firms are possible sources of funding for the national legal portal.
“I argue, that the potential source of such funding for investment could be the interest that accrue on funds that clients deposit with lawyers when lawyers are providing them with legal services,” he stated.
“At present, the interest that accrue on such funds is not legally regulated. The lawyer and the client are free to decide what happens to the interest. Also depending on the accounts that the funds are deposited in, banks get sizeable interest-free loans when lawyers deposit such funds with the banks.”
He continued: “In one US Supreme Court decision, the court noted the dramatic success of the programme in serving the compelling interest of providing legal services to millions of needy Americans. In British Columbia, the interest paid by financial institutions on funds held in Lawyers Trust Accounts is paid to the law foundation of British Columbia. Law firms are required to instruct their banks to remit those funds directly to the law foundation. The law foundation is a non-governmental organisation, created by legislation, and it uses those funds for various initiatives, including legal research, legal reform, and scholarship.”
He was speaking on the first day of the 2022 JB Danquah memorial lecture series on the theme, ‘Digitalisation and the Future of the Ghana Legal System’, held at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in Accra.
