You are the lawyer
A law degree is a voice, courtroom or not. The task is to use it to reason rather than to inflame, to weigh not only what is written, but what is left unsaid.
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A law degree is a voice, courtroom or not. The task is to use it to reason rather than to inflame, to weigh not only what is written, but what is left unsaid.
Last week I stood in front of Ateneo Law School’s newest students, in the same auditorium where, years ago, I was the nervous one bracing for recitation. I went back to tell them something I have come to believe more firmly the longer I serve in the Office of the Ombudsman: the hardest part of legal work is judgment, and judgment is the one thing this profession cannot afford to hand off.
I gave them a number that has stayed with me. This year, roughly 400 law students competed for 30 internship slots in our office, and more than 3,500 people applied for 114 permanent posts. Whatever else is wrong with our politics, the appetite among young Filipinos to enter public service is real. So are the stakes, and that is why what this generation does with that hunger matters.
Two forces will test their judgment in ways they did not test mine.
The first is artificial intelligence. These students have tools that can summarize a hundred cases in minutes, tools I did not have as a student and that are already reshaping how we work. At the Ombudsman, technology helps us organize records and flag patterns across cases that span years, and in an office where delay means justice denied, that efficiency matters.
But a machine cannot decide whether an official’s explanation is credible. It cannot tell whether a delayed transaction reflects negligence or malice. It reads text; it does not read people.
Machines also hallucinate. They get things confidently, convincingly wrong and someone has to be standing there, prepared to catch it.
The second force is the temperature of our public life. Discourse is loud, narratives outrun facts and it has never been easier to pour fuel on a fire already burning. I have been on the receiving end: twisted narratives, fake news, messages I would not repeat here.
My rule is simple: “pikon talo.” Choose resolution over escalation. Not because conflict is always wrong, but because a divided country does not reform and does not progress.
Both problems are, at bottom, the same problem. Whether the pressure comes from a machine that flatters us with easy answers or a crowd that rewards the loudest voice, the temptation is identical: To stop thinking for ourselves.
There is no replacement for critical thinking, not a smarter tool and not a louder argument. A law degree is a voice, courtroom or not. The task is to use it to reason rather than to inflame, to weigh not only what is written, but what is left unsaid.
That is the muscle I asked them to protect. The technology is the assistant. The country needs them to be the lawyers.
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