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Search Philippine law — real, cited, and ranked by authority.

Ask in plain English or Filipino. BatasDB reads a verified library of more than 256,000 Philippine laws, cases, and agency rules, ranks results by legal authority, and summarizes only what it actually found.

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Legal Search

Ask about Philippine law in plain English.

Can a probationary employee be dismissed for failing standards that were never disclosed at hiring?
4 results 143 ms
AI Answer

Generally, no. Under Article 296 of the Labor Code, a probationary employee may only be terminated for failing reasonable standards made known at the time of engagement.1 If the employer never communicated those standards, the dismissal is invalid and the employee is deemed to have acquired regular status.2

1 SC Decision G.R. No. 192571
96% match

Abbott Laboratories, Philippines v. Alcaraz

When the employer fails to communicate the standards for regularization at the time of engagement, the employee is deemed a regular employee and cannot be dismissed except for just or authorized causes…

Digest Source
2 SC Decision G.R. No. 185829
91% match

Aliling v. Feliciano

Termination of probationary employment for failure to qualify requires reasonable standards, made known to the employee, and effectively communicated at the time of engagement, not after…

Digest Source

The flow

What happens when you search.

Four steps, usually under 200 milliseconds from start to finish. Each step has its own job — and none of them makes up facts.

  1. 01

    You ask in plain language.

    Type a question the way you'd ask a lawyer — in English, Filipino, or a mix. You can also paste a specific citation ("G.R. No. 214830", "Article 315 RPC") and go straight to it. No special symbols, no keyword guessing.

  2. 02

    We search Philippine law only.

    Two searches run side by side — one that matches meaning, one that matches exact text — across more than 256,000 Philippine legal documents, over 700,000 searchable sections. Nothing foreign, nothing made up, nothing outside our library.

  3. 03

    We rank by legal authority, not just text match.

    A tax circular isn't the Constitution. An SC en banc ruling outweighs a division decision on the same question. Results are ordered by how much authority a document actually carries — so the binding answer comes up first.

  4. 04

    A short summary, based only on what we found.

    A plain-English summary reads only the matching passages and cites them back. It never invents legal text. If the answer isn't in our library, the summary says so instead of guessing.

What we cover

Philippine law only.

A focused library makes for a sharper search. BatasDB only covers the laws and rulings that actually bind a Philippine court — nothing else.

Court decisions
Supreme Court decisions since 1901, plus the Court of Tax Appeals and Sandiganbayan — en banc, division, and per curiam rulings.
Laws & Codes
Republic Acts, older statutes, and the Constitution — full text, split where the law itself splits (section, article, paragraph), so every result is citable.
Government agency rules
Circulars and rules from the BIR, SEC, BSP, DILG, COMELEC, CSC, DOLE, COA, and more — the issuances practice actually turns on.
Freshness & scope
New documents are added every day, and repealed provisions are flagged. Philippine law only — no U.S. case law, no UK statutes, no legal blogs.

For builders

Build your own AI assistant on our API.

The same search that powers BatasDB is available as an API. Point your internal tools or AI assistant at a single endpoint and get grounded, authority-ranked Philippine law back as clean JSON — no scraping, no foreign case law, no made-up citations.

See how it works

One call covers

  • • Supreme Court, CTA & Sandiganbayan decisions
  • • Republic Acts, Codes & the Constitution
  • • Agency issuances — BIR, BSP, SEC, DOLE, DILG

Go deeper

Read the details.

The short version is above. For the how-and-why behind each stage:

Deep dive

How search works.

Why we read questions and laws differently, how we combine meaning-based and exact-text matching, and why we split laws the way they split themselves.

Read →

Deep dive

How ranking works.

The full authority ladder — Constitution, statute, SC en banc, division, agency circular, and everything below — plus how we weigh each tier.

Read →

Try it on a question you already know the answer to.

The fastest way to trust a search system is to give it a question you can already verify. 7-day free trial, no credit card.

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