“I didn’t quite understand the extent of what I was working on”: Day 1-1000 of Citizens’ Gavel

If you ask Nelson Olanipekun how he built Citizens’ Gavel, the non-profit platform that uses AI to help people navigate Nigeria’s justice system, he would start with the story of an elderly woman whose case mirrored something much closer to home.

In 2017, he was working as a lawyer in a private firm, whose major clients were banks, when the case landed on his desk. The retired woman had taken an unnamed bank to court after it refused to pay out her savings, plus interest. Nelson’s job was to defend the bank. 

As the case proceeded, it began to look familiar. Years earlier, Olanipekun’s father was caught in a similar ordeal in which the same procedural tactics nearly cost his family their home.

He left the law firm after a few months. He had no plan in mind, but with only the conviction to change the system he was working within, a system, he believed, wasn’t built to protect the people it claimed to serve.

Day 1: An idea that didn’t hold

The gap in Nigeria’s justice system is significant. According to the World Justice Project, an international civil society organisation aiming to advance the rule of law globally, the country ranks 104th of 143 on civil justice and 90th of 143 on criminal justice, with cost, delay, effectiveness, corruption and discrimination among the biggest barriers. 

Within that context, Olanipekun began to think about how technology could be used to address some of these gaps.

His first idea for an access-to-justice platform powered by technology was not Citizens’ Gavel. He called it Open Judiciary, and it was designed to fight corruption within the judicial system.

The idea was built on stare decisis, a legal doctrine that requires lower courts to follow established precedents, especially from superior courts. According to Olanipekun, Open Judiciary was intended to track and monitor whether judgments from lower courts aligned with a precedent from higher courts. 

In 2017, he joined the accelerator programme at CivicHive, an initiative focused on startups using technology to drive civic engagement. It was during one of the pitch sessions that he was asked to refine his idea. Instead of trying to analyse the system from the outside, he began to think about how to intervene directly and connect people to lawyers to enable them to understand the justice system.

That became Citizens’ Gavel, an access-to-justice platform launched the same year.

Gavel’s early activities were mainly carried out on social media. On those platforms, people would reach out to organisations to report incidents. Olanipekun said he would pick up cases, follow up on them, and in many instances, travel to locations himself to intervene. By 2018, lawyers who saw the work based on people’s reactions on social media joined Citizens’ Gavel as volunteers.

Funding at this stage was little. The CivicHive accelerator provided a fellowship stipend that he used for rent and volunteer support, and there was still no full clarity on what Gavel would become. 

“I didn’t quite understand the full extent of what I was working on, the full extent of the problem,” he said. “Nothing was clear initially, but I felt that it was unique because I was using technology.” 

Day 500: Working the #EndSARS movement

Olanipekun noted that by early 2019, Citizens’ Gavel’s activities began unfolding in waves. 

Across Nigeria, there were repeated reports of police brutality, particularly involving the now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the police that had long been accused of extortion, unlawful arrests, and violence. Each time there was an incident of police brutality, people would go online to make a post and tag organisations to get help. 

In October 2020, these scattered incidents became a nationwide youth-led protest, tagged #EndSARS, demanding accountability, reform, and an end to systemic abuse. Protesters who needed legal support, and families who were trying to get their loved ones released, were among the people Olanipekun said reached out to the organisation. According to him, the cases Citizen’s Gavel handled at that time multiplied.

Citizen’s Gavel was not alone in that moment. A loose network of organisations, including the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) Nigeria, a human rights advocacy organisation; Feminist Coalition, a women’s rights advocacy group that led emergency response, fundraising, and logistic support for protesters; and Mentally Aware NG, a mental health nonprofit that offered free therapy for illegally detained and harassed protesters, were among the organisations that assisted during that period.

To respond to the influx of cases, Citizens’ Gavel had to operate like an emergency system. Olanipekun said that Gavel’s network of volunteer lawyers expanded to 250 across the country, with rapid response legal teams, who could get to police stations and engage authorities quickly, positioned in Lagos and Abuja. 

According to him, Gavel secured the release of detainees and worked on cases that led to compensation for victims.

“That year alone, we were involved in over 400 intervention cases specifically tailored to people who were arrested and detained during the EndSARS protest,” he said.

As the cases increased for Gavel’s team, so did the risks. Olanipekun recalled that they received threats and intimidation calls to stop litigation. He also described that witness protection became a part of their job.

“#EndSARS was the hardest. It was emotionally draining,” he said. “I had to run away from the country because of the blowback.”

By the time the protests slowed, Citizens’ Gavel had operationally gone through a pressure and scale different from what it started as. That experience shaped what it built next.

Day 1000: Building structure around scale

Post 2020, Olanipekun described activities at Citizens’ Gavel as revolving around putting more structures following the deluge of cases the team handled during the protests. The organisation built products that could handle parts of the process without needing a lawyer at every step.

There was Justice Clock in 2021, designed for tracking case files and managing cases launched by the Lagos State Government. There was also Filer, which Olanipekun described as a platform that used dispatch riders to help law firms file cases in court. Then there was Renew, a simpler tool designed to help people with the name change process. 

These products were attempts to stretch the model beyond direct intervention, but Filer and Renew were discontinued because they failed to gain enough traction to justify continued investment. The next iteration would be different.

In 2024, Citizens’ Gavel launched Podus AI, an AI-for-justice platform trained with laws and judicial precedents in Nigeria. Users can describe their issue by typing or using voice on WhatsApp, and the system generates legal documents, cites relevant Nigerian laws, and points users to the right government agencies to escalate the issue. 

He explained that the introduction of AI was about reducing human intervention in a system where demand far outpaces the number of available lawyers.

“There were always a lot of complaints from people who needed lawyers, and that was what informed Podus AI,” he said. “It’s not sustainable just having lawyers, so we had to create Podus AI to empower people.”

It is, in Olanipekun’s words, the organisation’s most successful product so far. He said the platform has grown to have over 33,000 users since its launch. It is around this tool that Gavel has continued expanding its capabilities by introducing additional layers, including background checks. 

Olanipekun said Gavel has been sustained by grants and fundraisers, adding that the organisation has raised over $1 million since 2017.

But grants alone were not enough to guarantee long-term sustainability. The organisation began to build tools for businesses willing to pay to support its access-to-justice work.

He described Gavel’s next phase as focused on making the system work, including fundraisers and adding enforcement pathways where regulators and courts can plug into the system to enforce complaints. At the same time, the organisation is looking to expand beyond Nigeria to Ghana and Senegal. 

Over nearly a decade, Citizens’ Gavel has moved from a one-person effort into a system that has handled thousands of legal issues across Nigeria. 

According to Olanipekun, the organisation has handled over 6,500 legal interventions since its inception, ranging from police brutality cases to consumer protection, landlord disputes, and legal advisory.

What began as a lawyer stepping away from a system he felt held back justice has since become something that builds tools that give people a way to move through the justice system and push it to respond.