Prime Minister Philip Davis’s Keynote Address at the Opening of The Law Society’s Legal Week 2026

“TRADITION AND INNOVATION: REDEFINING LAW FOR TODAY”

So much has changed from when I started law.

When I began, we drafted by hand, we stood in long lines at the registry, and we searched for cases by physically pulling books from shelves. If you needed an authority from another jurisdiction, you wrote letters, you waited, you travelled, and you sat in another person’s library.

There were no phones in our pockets. There were no late night messages from clients arriving on a screen you carry everywhere you go. There were no systems that could prepare a first draft of an opinion after a few typed instructions.

Tonight, I am speaking to students who can pull down an entire commonwealth of precedent in seconds. You can have a case summarised before you finish a cup of coffee. Some of you have already experimented with tools that will generate an argument or a draft contract faster than any junior in my day could have imagined.

You live in a very different world from the one that formed me as a young lawyer.

That is why I appreciate the theme you have chosen for Legal Week 2026: “Tradition and Innovation: Redefining Law for Today.” I have spent my life inside the tradition you are studying. I now lead a government that must respond to the technologies you use every day. So, this evening, I want to stay with one central question.

How do we welcome innovation, especially technological change, without handing over our thinking to the tools we use.

To answer that, we need to talk honestly about what we mean by tradition in law, what these new tools can do, and what they can never be allowed to do.

Let me start with tradition.

When lawyers speak about tradition, we often list doctrines and cases. That has its place. But underneath the cases and the doctrines sit habits of mind and habits of character.

Tradition taught us to ask basic questions.

What is the rule.

Where does it come from.

What is the authority for it.

How has it developed over time.

Does it fit within our Constitution and our values.

Tradition insisted that we read judgments with care. We learnt to separate the holding from commentary, to follow a principle across a line of cases, and to notice when a court was quietly signalling a change in direction.

Tradition also taught us about honesty with facts. If the evidence hurt your client’s position, tradition did not permit you to pretend otherwise. You were expected to confront the difficulty, to face it squarely, and to give your client clear advice.

These habits were drilled into us long before anyone carried a laptop into a courtroom.

Tradition shaped how we saw our work in a small democracy like The Bahamas. Law was never a puzzle set for clever people. A bail hearing could determine whether a young person went home that night or stayed on remand. A licensing decision could influence whether a family business survived. A contractual clause, overlooked or misunderstood, could cost a community opportunities for years.

Tradition spoke quietly, but firmly: this work carries weight, so think carefully.

Now, let us look at the world you are preparing to enter.

You will deal with messages, photographs and videos as evidence, all created and shared on devices you use every day. You will advise clients about online defamation, about comments made in group chats and posts that travel across borders in seconds. You will read contracts that are accepted with a click rather than signed around a table. You will meet clients who have already asked a software system for an answer and now want to know if you agree.

You will have tools that summarise, predict, draft and recommend.

Some of those tools will be very useful. They will save time. They will help you notice connections. They will make it easier for people of modest means to access legal information. They already play a part in modern practice, and their role will probably grow.

The real danger is somewhere else. The real danger is that the tools begin to think for you.

If you accept every suggested case without reading it for yourself, the tool is thinking for you.

If you accept a proposed sentence, or a risk score, or a contract clause without asking who designed the system, what data was used, and who might be harmed by those choices, the tool is thinking for you.

If you allow a first draft that appeared on your screen to become a final position without asking whether it reflects your understanding of the law, the facts and your ethical duties, then the tool is thinking for you.

At that point, you are not really practising law. You are simply managing output.

Law school exists so that you learn to avoid that.

The point of your legal education is not to turn you into a person who remembers the most information. The point is to train your mind to handle conflict, doubt and consequence.

You are learning to hold a statute in one hand and a messy set of facts in the other, and to work your way through the tension between them until you reach a result you can defend in court, to your client, and to yourself.

You are learning to say to a client, “I understand what you want, but this is what the law allows, and this is what is wise.” Those two sentences are related, but they are not identical. Technology can accelerate the search for information. It cannot decide what is wise. It cannot feel the weight of a woman who is about to lose her home. It cannot stand in a busy courtroom and make a split second decision about whether to ask one more question or to sit down.

So what does this mean for you now, as students at the University of The Bahamas.

It means you should start building certain habits while you are still here, before practice pulls you into its deadlines and its pressures.

First, when a tool gives you an answer, return to the source.

If software produces a list of cases, choose the important ones and read them fully. Look at the facts, the reasoning and the orders, not just the headnotes. If it quotes a section of an Act, open the Act, read the whole section, and then read the sections around it. Develop the habit of dealing with primary legal materials directly.

Second, when a system presents you with patterns, ask who might suffer if that pattern is wrong.

If a model tells you that certain neighbourhoods contain higher risk borrowers, ask whether those neighbourhoods have faced years of underinvestment, higher interest rates or limited access to credit. If a program claims that certain groups offend more, ask whether those groups have been policed and charged more aggressively than others. Patterns in data often reflect decisions made by people in power. Not every pattern deserves to be repeated.

Third, own your advice.

One day soon, your name will appear at the bottom of written opinions, and your words will be recorded in court transcripts. When that happens, remember that you are responsible for every argument you put forward. A tool may help you prepare, but it cannot carry the responsibility that attaches to your licence to practise. That responsibility sits with you.

Here in The Bahamas, these issues are already pressing. Our country sits inside networks of finance, security, trade and regulation that cross borders. We face climate risk, cybercrime and fast moving demands from international standard setters.

The choices we make about data protection, digital identification, surveillance powers, online commerce and digital assets will shape daily life for Bahamians across all our islands.

We need lawyers who can sit at negotiation tables in regional and global forums, understand the technical proposals being discussed, and still ask simple but profound questions: how will this work for Bahamian people, does this respect our Constitution, does this reflect our sense of fairness.

No software will ask those questions for us. If our own lawyers and judges do not raise them, they will not be raised at all.

I know the attraction of technology. It replies instantly. It sounds confident. It makes complex material seem easy. But confidence is not the same as accuracy, and speed is not the same as justice.

There is genuine courage in saying, “Slow down. Show me the sources. Give me time to think.”

Let me offer you two quick pictures from public life.

Imagine that you work in the Office of the Attorney General, and you are asked to advise on a proposal to use cameras and automated systems to track vehicles across several islands. The presentation looks impressive. The vendor promises safer streets, faster investigations and more efficient use of police resources.

A tool can tell you where the cars go. It cannot tell you how long data should be kept, who should have access to it, or what protections are needed to prevent misuse. Those questions belong to law. Those questions belong to you.

Or imagine that you are in private practice, and a client wants to launch an online lending platform that decides in seconds who receives credit and who does not. The system uses address information, employment history and even behaviour on social media. The marketing language speaks about inclusion and opportunity.

A tool can find patterns in the data. It cannot decide whether a particular pattern amounts to discrimination under Bahamian law. It cannot decide whether the structure of the product is fair to people who have never been treated fairly by financial institutions. Once again, those questions belong to you.

This is where your theme comes alive. Tradition and innovation are not rivals. Tradition gives you the tools to ask hard questions and to insist that power, whether human or digital, operates within limits. Innovation brings new tools, new facts and new forms of evidence into the conversation.

Your task, as the next generation of Bahamian lawyers, is to hold both in view. Let technology serve you. Let it expand what you can see and how quickly you can see it. But do not let it decide what is right.

So much has changed from when I started law. The tools, the pace, the pressures are different. Yet the heart of the work has not changed. Someone will come to you with a problem they cannot solve alone, and they will trust you with it. A court will listen to you because it hopes you can help it see clearly through confusion and noise.

In those moments, the essential question will be very simple.

Did you do the hard work of thinking.

During this Legal Week, enjoy the lectures, the panels, the moots and the debates. Ask your questions. Test your ideas. But sometime this week, when you have a quiet moment, I encourage you to ask yourself one personal question.

In my career, who will think for me.

If your answer is that no tool will ever think in your place, that you will always return to the sources, to the principles and to your own trained judgment, then technology will serve you well. It will serve your clients, it will serve our courts, and it will serve The Bahamas.

That is the kind of lawyer our country needs. That is the kind of lawyer you have every chance of becoming.

Thank you.