A locally developed platform is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help lawyers and ordinary Filipinos search Philippine laws and court decisions using everyday language, while checking citations against source documents before displaying an answer.
KARTILYA.PH describes itself as a free “AI-native archive” of Philippine law. Unlike repositories such as LawPhil, the Official Gazette, and the Supreme Court E-Library, the platform allows users to submit questions instead of searching through documents using specific legal terms.
“Philippine law is free in theory but hard to use in practice. The texts sit in different places, and finding the right provision means already knowing the legal vocabulary and where to look,” KARTILYA.PH founder Karlo Dizon said in an email interview.
“Lawyers spend hours on work that should take minutes, and ordinary Filipinos are effectively locked out of the law that governs them. I built KARTILYA.PH so that anyone can ask the law a question in plain language and get a direct, trustworthy answer,” he added.
Dizon is a lawyer and technologist from Bataan who is now based in New York. He studied at Yale University and the London School of Economics, earned his Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School, and practiced litigation at WilmerHale in Washington DC. He also serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on AI and Emerging Technologies.
His platform does not replace existing government and private legal repositories but builds on the materials they publish. Its search system retrieves relevant provisions and decisions before a separate verification component checks the citations against the archive.
“Those are publishers, and they are essential. KARTILYA.PH builds on what they make available. But they assume you already know what you are looking for,” Dizon said.
“KARTILYA.PH adds the layer they never had: you ask a question in plain language, and using AI, the platform finds the right provisions and decisions, then shows you the actual text with every citation verified.”
The platform uses large language models configured for Philippine law, along with a semantic search layer covering statutes, legal codes, and Supreme Court decisions. Rather than relying only on keywords, the system interprets the meaning of a user’s question and reformulates it using relevant legal concepts.
For example, a query stating that an employee was dismissed without notice could retrieve provisions and rulings on security of tenure even if the user did not use that term.
Before an answer is displayed, the verification engine retrieves the full text of each cited provision or ruling, checks whether the authority exists, and determines whether the passage relied upon appears in the source and is relevant to the response. Material that cannot be verified is supposed to be flagged or withheld.
Dizon acknowledged, however, that authentic citations do not guarantee a correct legal interpretation.
“Yes, and we are upfront about that. Verification guarantees that every source is real, correctly cited, and on point. It does not make interpretation infallible,” he said.
“That is why every answer shows the full text it relies on, and why KARTILYA.PH is a research tool rather than a substitute for a lawyer’s judgment.”
The system also maps relationships among laws and court decisions, including later rulings that discuss earlier cases. Instead of automatically labeling a decision as “good law” or “bad law,” the platform displays the relevant passages so users can assess how the Supreme Court treated the earlier ruling.
Its decisions archive currently covers rulings from 2020 to the present, although Dizon said the collection is continuing to expand.
The corpus is maintained at the level of individual provisions, allowing the system to cite a specific section instead of an entire statute. New laws, rules, and decisions are processed in regular batches through an automated pipeline, with updates technically possible within days of official publication.
When a legal question depends heavily on disputed facts, Dizon said the platform is designed to provide the relevant authorities without presenting its answer as professional legal advice.
“Where an answer depends on facts, the platform says what the law provides and hands over the controlling texts, and leaves the application to the reader,” he said. “It is built to make lawyers faster and the public better informed, not to replace judgment.”
KARTILYA.PH is self-funded and does not carry advertising or monetize user information. Dizon plans to offer paid professional tools for law firms and institutions while keeping the public legal archive free.
“The law itself stays free; that is a commitment, not a promotion,” he said. “The public archive remains free regardless.”
According to Dizon, each AI-generated answer costs a few cents, while cached responses to repeated questions do not incur additional generation costs. The service operates under a capped monthly budget.
“One lesson of this project is that the barrier to a service like this was never really cost. It was the discipline of verification,” Dizon said.
Dizon said government agencies considering an AI-searchable national legal database should focus first on assembling a complete and structured collection of legal materials and establishing a reliable citation-checking system.
“The hard part is not the AI. It is building a complete, structured corpus and never showing a citation that has not been checked against the real text,” he said.
