From billions claimed over oil spills to lawyers struggling to collect their fees, speakers at the NBA AGC in Port Harcourt confronted two poignant questions: How should courts put a price on loss, and why do lawyers so often struggle to put a price on their own work?
PORT HARCOURT — In the courtroom, the question may be how much money can fairly compensate a farmer whose land has been polluted, a fisherman whose livelihood has disappeared or a company that has suffered a commercial loss.
In the lawyer’s office, the question can be just as evoking: What is the value of the professional work being performed, and how much should the client pay for it?
Two sessions at the 2026 Nigerian Bar Association Annual General Conference in Port Harcourt have brought those questions into sharp focus, with lawyers, judges, valuers and other professionals examining the economics of justice from opposite ends of the legal system.
At Breakout Session XI, “Damages & Discretion,” participants confronted the difficulty of translating injury into money, particularly in oil-spill and environmental disputes where the losses can extend across land, livelihoods and entire communities.
A separate session on “The Business of Fees: How Lawyers Should Price, Bill, and Get Paid” turned the spotlight inward, challenging lawyers to rethink an aspect of professional practice that is often treated as an uncomfortable afterthought: getting paid for their work.
The discussions may have dealt with different problems, but they converged on one principle—value must be established with evidence, clarity and professional discipline.
When damages become a guessing game
At the damages session, the panel warned against allowing judicial discretion to become a licence for arbitrary awards.
Justice Turaki Adamu Mohammed, Emonye Adekwu, SAN, Ama Etuwewe, SAN, Miannaya Aja Essien, SAN, FCIArb, Sam Brown, Henry Chigbo, Austine Omosigbo and Dr Moses Owede Vincent, moderated by Peter Imoh Ekpaidot and coordinated by Suleiman Abdulganiyu, examined some of the recurring difficulties confronting courts in compensation claims.
The discussion was particularly pointed in relation to environmental and oil-spill litigation.
An oil spill can destroy farmland, contaminate fishing grounds and interrupt a family’s livelihood for months or years. But establishing precisely what was lost, by whom, for how long and at what value can become a formidable evidential exercise.
Henry Chigbo identified several recurring problems, including repeated spills, prolonged disruption of farming and fishing, inflated claims and inconsistent valuation reports. Claims sometimes cover entire communities without clearly identifying the losses suffered by individual claimants. Multiple ownership claims, inadequate survey plans and uncertainty over the precise area affected can further complicate the calculation.
That is where the courtroom’s discretion meets the hard evidence.
“The exercise of discretion is not an avenue to award a windfall,” Etuwewe said.
The observation goes to the heart of a recurring problem in damages litigation. Compensation is supposed to repair a proven injury, not create an unexpected financial prize for a claimant. Yet the opposite danger is equally serious: an injured person or community should not be denied adequate compensation simply because the loss is difficult to calculate.
Emonye Adekwu, SAN, explained that compensatory damages are intended, as far as money can reasonably achieve it, to restore an injured party to the position that would have existed had the injury not occurred. He also called for reforms allowing judges to appoint independent experts in highly technical cases involving scientific, environmental and professional valuation evidence.
The call has particular significance in environmental litigation, where judges may be asked to assess evidence far beyond conventional courtroom experience.
The evidence must survive the courtroom
The panel also placed much of the responsibility on valuers and other experts whose reports can determine whether a claim succeeds or collapses.
Participants called for more uniform valuation methodologies, with reports supported by photographs, survey plans, accurate descriptions of affected areas, population information and verifiable evidence of economic activity.
Timing matters too.
A valuation carried out long after an oil spill may encounter a landscape that has changed, physical evidence that has disappeared and economic activity that is difficult to reconstruct. The panel therefore advocated definite timeframes for assessments.
Dr Moses Owede Vincent widened the discussion beyond the immediate claimant and defendant.
A large damages award against a company does not necessarily end with the parties to the lawsuit. It can affect investment decisions, business operations and the wider economy, he argued, particularly where compensation is excessive, speculative or poorly calculated. At the same time, economic considerations cannot be used to deprive people who have suffered genuine losses of adequate compensation.
The challenge, therefore, is not to make damages awards artificially small.
It is to make them defensible.
The panel’s conclusion was that consistency does not mean every similar case must produce the same monetary figure. Courts must apply established principles consistently while paying close attention to the evidence and circumstances of each case.
Then the lawyers turned the question on themselves
If the first session asked how the legal system should value a claimant’s loss, another session asked why lawyers themselves often struggle to value their professional services.
At the session titled “The Business of Fees: How Lawyers Should Price, Bill, and Get Paid,” Chief Emeka Obegolu, SAN, Chairman of the NBA Remuneration Committee, moderated a panel featuring Bode Olanipekun, SAN; Ikechukwu Ekwueme; Chinyere Okorocha; Aisha Ado Abdullahi; and Isdore Ozuo.
The discussion went beyond the perennial complaint that clients do not pay lawyers on time.
The deeper issue, the panel suggested, begins much earlier—with how lawyers define and communicate the value of their work.
Lawyers spend years learning statutes, cases and legal principles, yet many enter practice with little formal understanding of pricing, budgeting, cash flow, profitability or financial planning.
That can create problems on both sides of the lawyer-client relationship.
A client who does not understand exactly what has been agreed may later challenge a bill. A lawyer who fails to explain the scope of the engagement may find it difficult to justify additional charges. A vague fee arrangement can eventually become a professional dispute.
The panel therefore stressed the importance of engagement letters and properly prepared fee notes, with clients clearly informed about the scope of the retainer, professional fees, additional expenses, the basis for calculating charges and the agreed payment arrangements.
The legal and ethical framework also matters. Lawyers were reminded that billing practices must comply with the applicable Remuneration Order, the Legal Practitioners Act and the professional rules governing legal practice.
For Obegolu, the profession needs to broaden its definition of competence.
A lawyer may know every important case on a subject and still struggle to run a sustainable practice if he or she cannot manage its finances.
“Ultimately, the goal is not simply to charge more. It is to price fairly, deliver value, communicate clearly and get paid professionally,” he said.
It is an unusually practical message for a profession that often speaks in the language of doctrine and precedent.
But it may also be one of the more consequential conversations at this year’s conference.
The modern law firm is not sustained by legal knowledge alone. Salaries must be paid, offices maintained, technology acquired, research conducted and clients served. Where lawyers consistently underprice their work or fail to recover agreed fees, the consequences eventually reach the quality and sustainability of legal services.
Two sides of the same problem
There is an intriguing connection between the two sessions.
In the first, lawyers were asking courts to put a fair monetary value on someone else’s loss.
In the second, they were being asked to put a fair monetary value on their own professional labour.
Both require evidence. Both require clarity. Both can go wrong when assumptions replace proper assessment. And both have consequences beyond the immediate dispute.
A poorly calculated environmental claim can produce an unjust award, distort commercial decisions or leave a genuinely injured community inadequately compensated.
A poorly structured legal fee can damage the relationship between counsel and client, create avoidable disputes and undermine the sustainability of a law practice.
Perhaps the larger lesson from the two sessions is that value in law cannot simply be asserted. It has to be demonstrated.
For the courts, that means evidence strong enough to justify the award.
For lawyers, it means professional work sufficiently understood, documented and communicated to justify the fee.
At a conference themed “Beyond Limits,” the discussion offered a rather practical limit that neither judges nor lawyers can afford to ignore: Justice may be priceless, but the losses it seeks to remedy—and the professional work required to deliver it—must still be measured with care.
