Sam Okudzeto & Associates has been one of the pioneers of corporate and commercial legal practice in Ghana since its founding in 1971. It has advised multinationals, navigated petroleum deals, and argued before Ghana’s highest courts for over five decades. Now, it is integrating AI into its workflow.
The firm has signed on to Eskwai — a product built by Kwame AI, a Ghanaian-born startup, that gives legal teams AI-assisted research, drafting, and document review across a unified account.
What Eskwai Actually Does
Eskwai is a legal AI assistant that enables lawyers to perform legal research, draft documents, and review contracts using a comprehensive database of case laws and legislation, user-uploaded documents, and the web. Its focus is deliberately local — built for African jurisdictions, not retrofitted from a Western product.
That specificity matters more than it sounds. Most global legal AI tools are trained predominantly on US and UK legal corpora. Ask them about Ghanaian case law or the nuances of the PNDC-era statutes, and they struggle. Eskwai is built around African legal databases from the ground up.
A Market Starting to Move
The SOA deal is Eskwai’s second high-profile firm partnership in recent months. Earlier this year, N. Dowuona & Company, one of Ghana’s premier full-service corporate law firms, became an early adopter.
Kwame AI reports around 1,800 users across more than 120 law firms and legal departments — modest numbers by Silicon Valley standards, but meaningful traction for a legal AI product operating in a market where trust is slow-built, and billing models are conservative.
The startup is also expanding its footprint beyond commercial clients. It recently launched a pro bono programme giving Ghana’s Legal Aid Commission — which serves a country of over 30 million people with roughly 45 full-time legal aid lawyers — free access to its full suite of tools.
