Bar exams vs artificial intelligence

The University of the Philippines College of Law’s foyer trumpets “teaching law in a grand manner,” not “being the best review center for a glorified pass/fail exam.”

The difference is critical for law students training for the industrial revolution when Skynet is poised to rule the world.

I sat with utmost pride in Prof. Harry Roque’s living room one midnight. I watched his students Gil Anthony Aquino, Raphael Pangalangan, Pauline Gairanod, Pip Chungalao, Rachel Miranda and Gemmo Fernandez drill for the then unknown Price Media Law Moot Court on European free speech law.

Instead of grades and bar exams, they poured their time into a field not even taught in the Philippines. They won on their first try in 2015, out-debating Europeans in Oxford.

This inspired other schools; the University of San Carlos produced this year’s Price Moot Court world champions.

That pioneering UP team honed the exact opposite skills for topping the bar. My New York Bar reviewer emphasized it demands a lower level of intelligence, a Forrest Gump focus. Passing the bar would be easier without a law degree, memorizing without underlying doctrine.

But they are destined to be great lawyers.

Team captain Aquino (Class 2015) was an architect of CenterLaw’s innovative anti-Tokhang Supreme Court case. Retired chief justice Artemio Panganiban devoted an entire column to the ideas of Pangalangan (Class 2016), who won his dissertation contest on liberty and prosperity. He then featured Tess Tan, runner-up and USC Price Moot Court team captain.

Instead of celebrating such feats, why do we obsess over “a simple licensure exam that mutated into a rite of passage and national spectacle” (“Why bar exams ruin legal education,” 10/03/14)?

Our phones may soon be able to recite every comma in the Rules of Court from memory, commoditizing the legal skill we inexplicably admire so.

Like a museum curio, the late National Librarian Tony Santos held up a “quick index” of one-sentence summaries of decisions to my UP freshman class in 2001.

As Santos predicted, I never touched a quick index. I taught myself to search electronic copies. It took me minutes to find every Philippine Law Journal article the Supreme Court cited in 1991-2003, proving it barely cites local journals.

Today, Kira Systems lets me filter thousands of documents within an hour, including dinner while they upload into the artificial intelligence (AI).

In seconds, I can pinpoint potential clauses that trigger when a controlling shareholder changes, key in a corporate takeover, or simply what percentage of documents are under New York, English or an Asian law.

J.P. Morgan has deployed COIN (COntract INtelligence) to monitor thousands of loan agreements. Other AIs answer basic research queries in humanlike conversation, filter e-mails for tone and mood, and create first drafts of simple documents
beyond filling in blanks of templates.

Accounting, banking and medicine are similarly evolving. AIs trained on millions of photos of symptoms now provide initial diagnoses, freeing up human doctors.

Last year, Elon Musk’s AI beat professional players in the video game “Defense of the Ancients 2,” beyond chess and go.

Human professionals will no longer perform the tedious, low value and repetitive—exactly what bar exams have forced law schools to extol.

AIs trained with every single decision, law and bar review outline will always outperform law students in memorization games, so what is the point? The practice of law will increasingly value higher level, creative analysis and the irreplaceable human touch of being a credible adviser even the opposing side can trust.

Scoring 100 on a bar exam will be just as useful as reciting Pi to 100 decimal places.

The dawn of AI makes it ever more important to learn law in the grand manner and aspire to be great lawyers, even if it takes braving the snark of Roque’s living room. Students who hold no higher dream than topping a glorified standardized test may find themselves obsolete, welcoming their new robot overlords.

React: [email protected], Twitter @oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan.