Nigerian legal research
Nigerian law, answered with authority.
Nigerian judgments, statutes, CAMA 2020, ACJA, and the procedural rules, searched and synthesised into an answer that names its sources. Then attached to the matter it was researched for.
The corpus
What is searched.
Primary Nigerian law, indexed for semantic search rather than keyword matching, so a question phrased in your own words still finds the judgment that answers it.
- Case law: Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and superior court decisions.
- Statutes: federal legislation, including the Constitution and the principal Acts.
- CAMA 2020: the Companies and Allied Matters Act, for corporate and secretarial work.
- ACJA: the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, for criminal practice.
- Rules of court: procedural rules and practice directions.
In depth
Search finds documents. This gives you an answer.
Synthesis
Forty results, or one memo with citations.
A conventional Nigerian legal database returns a list and leaves the reading to you and your junior. ModulawAI reads the retrieved authorities and states the position, with each proposition tied to the case or section it rests on. You verify the citations rather than assemble the argument from scratch.
Connected
The research does not live in a separate window.
Because research happens inside the practice management system, the memo attaches to the matter, the time is captured against the client, and the authority is still there when the file is reassigned. That is the difference between a research subscription and a legal operating system.
Drafting
From authority to processes and pleadings.
Once the position is settled, the drafting happens in Microsoft Word with the same citations checked as you write. See the Word add-in.
FAQ
Questions, addressed.
How do I research Nigerian case law online?
You can search a Nigerian legal database by keyword and read the results, or you can ask a question in plain language and receive a synthesised answer with linked citations. ModulawAI does the second: it retrieves the relevant Nigerian judgments and statutory provisions, then states the position with each authority named so you can open and verify it.
Does it include CAMA 2020 and ACJA?
Yes. The Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 and the Administration of Criminal Justice Act are both in the corpus, alongside case law, federal legislation, and rules of court.
How is this different from a Nigerian law report database?
A law report database is a library with a search box. ModulawAI reads the retrieved authorities and answers the question, and it sits inside a full practice management platform, so the research is attached to the matter, billed against the client, and available to whoever picks the file up later.
Can it handle matters with English or US law elements?
Yes. Eight jurisdictions are covered in the same interface, which matters for Lagos commercial work where the financing documents are frequently governed by English law.
Is the research reliable enough to cite?
Every answer names the authority it relies on and links to it. Open the judgment and read it before you cite it: the tool is built to make that step fast, not to replace it.
Citation practice
One judgment, several citations.
Nigerian authority is reported across competing private series rather than a single official one, so the same Supreme Court decision can reach you under more than one reference. This is ordinary for Nigerian practitioners and completely opaque to software built elsewhere, which is why generic tools mangle Nigerian citations.
- NWLR, the Nigerian Weekly Law Reports, cited with a year, a volume, a part and a page, which is the form most commonly expected in a list of authorities.
- All FWLR, the All Federation Weekly Law Reports, running in parallel with its own volume and page numbering for many of the same decisions.
- LPELR, an electronic series whose references carry a suffix identifying the court, which is how a great deal of recent authority actually circulates.
- Unreported decisions, identified by suit or appeal number and the date of judgment, which is all you have for a ruling that has not yet been picked up by a series.
Two practical consequences. The first is that a search which only matches one series will miss the decision when a colleague hands you the other reference, which is why the corpus is indexed for meaning rather than for an exact string. The second is that your list of authorities has to carry the reference the court can actually locate, so the series matters at the filing stage even when it made no difference to the research.
A worked example
From a question to a filed submission.
Take a preliminary objection on the ground that a fresh step was taken with knowledge of the defect. The research is not the hard part. Keeping the authority, the draft and the matter attached to one another is.
- Ask in your own words. The question goes in as you would put it to a senior colleague, not as a boolean string, and the search runs against Nigerian judgments, federal legislation, the procedural rules and the principal Acts.
- Read the position, with each proposition tied to its source. What comes back is a statement of the position rather than forty results, and every sentence that carries legal weight names the case or the section it rests on.
- Open the authorities that will do work. Anything going into the submission gets read in the report. The others stay as background.
- Draft in Word against the same authorities. The add-in carries the research into the document, so the citation in the draft is the one you verified rather than one retyped from a note.
- The memo stays on the matter. The research attaches to the file with the time captured against the client, so when the point returns on appeal in eighteen months the reasoning is still there.
Where the corpus is thin. Coverage is strongest for superior court decisions and federal legislation. It is weakest for older authority, for unreported state High Court rulings, and for judgments delivered very recently. State legislation varies in availability. If an argument rests on a single authority in one of those categories, treat what you get as a lead and confirm it against the report or the registry.
Ask it a Nigerian question.
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