Blog
On accuracy, AI, and Philippine law.
Notes from the team building BatasDB — on why grounded legal research beats confident guessing, and what it takes to trust an AI with the law.
AI and the future of legal work
AI won't replace legal researchers. It'll make the good ones dangerous.
The fear that AI is coming for the lawyers misreads what legal work actually is. AI is a phenomenal librarian and a terrible advocate — with the right tech underneath, it deletes the grunt work and hands the judgment back to the person qualified to exercise it. Plus: five falsifiable questions to ask any legal AI tool.
Under the hood
The hard part isn't the AI. It's the law.
Accurate Philippine legal search isn't a model problem — it's a domain problem. The failure modes that trip up legal search, and the engineering BatasDB built to handle each: repealed-but-current provisions, short statutes losing to long cases, citations that point to half a rule.
The danger of AI legal opinions
An AI that gives legal opinions is a liability, not a lawyer.
General chatbots make case law up — and even purpose-built legal AI still hallucinates on 1 in 6 to 1 in 3 queries. Here's why, what it means for Philippine practice, and how BatasDB compares to today's Philippine legal AI tools and ChatGPT.