Leonen urges legal professionals to use AI critically to prevent injustice
Legal professionals and students were urged by Supreme Court (SC) Senior Associate Justice Marvic M.V.F. Leonen to use artificial intelligence (AI) critically, warning that its unmindful use could lead to injustice.
Speaking to participants at the SC’s AI Caravan lecture at the University of the Philippines College of Law in Diliman, Quezon City, on 12 October 2026, Leonen emphasized that people, lawyers, and judges who understand AI critically have an advantage over those who do not.
The lecture, titled “The Critical Use of AI: Challenges for the Philippine Legal Profession and the Judiciary,” is part of the SC’s efforts to guide the public on the Governance Framework on the Use of Human-Centered Augmented Intelligence in the Judiciary.
“For leaders of our profession, for champions like you, like all of you, and for our Judiciary, ignorance of artificial intelligence is simply irresponsible,” Leonen said.
Leonen opened the lecture by recounting the story of a woman who testified in court about what had been done to her, using her own words and language.
She stopped mid-sentence twice because she could not find the words, but the interpreter rendered her account without the pauses.
A voice-to-text application then produced the transcript, which became a file in a directory, then a data point, and eventually a variable.
Leonen said that one day, the variable could become training data for a system asked to determine what women like her usually mean — illustrating how a woman’s actual experience in court could be reduced to a data point for a machine.
Within the Judiciary, Leonen said, the SC has allowed only one AI tool, Scriptix, a voice-to-text transcription program used by stenographers across the country.
Stenographers remain essential despite the use of the tool because human oversight, editing, and a human-centered approach require them to review text captured by multidirectional microphones in courtrooms before a judge allows it to become the official transcript.
As part of its Strategic Plan for Judicial Innovations 2022–2027 (SPJI), the SC has also pursued digitalization, which Leonen explained is distinct from AI.
“Digitalization simply wants to replace the platform, the paper. It is the how of justice, it is about records, the filings, summonses, raffles, hearings from paper to a digital platform. It’s the plumbing, the logistics, the medium that carries the data of a case from grievance to judgment. And it matters,” he said.
Through the eCourt system, Leonen noted that the SC’s digitalization initiatives have improved court processes, including the filing and service of pleadings, judgments, and other papers in civil cases. Processes that previously took months or even years have been shortened through electronic procedures.
AI, on the other hand, “is working with the data to do analysis, to write the order, to actually doing some form of a judgment on the data that you have in that particular case,” he said.