KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE NEW LAWYERS OF 2013 Maria Lourdes P. A.

Sereno
Chief Justice 24 April 2013, PICC, Manila

Fellow justices of the High Court, other members of the judiciary, deans and faculty members of law schools, the 2012 bar examiners, other officials and fellow workers in the Supreme Court, our newly minted lawyers, their parents and other loved ones, guests, friends, good afternoon to all of you. Allow me first of all, to congratulate Justice Martin S. Villarama, Jr. for the successful conduct and conclusion to the 2012 bar examinations. A round of applause is also deserved by the Bar Confidant, Atty. Cristina Layusa, and her able team of OBC personnel and to other Supreme Court personnel who augmented her team. Your young lives have been marked by intense struggles with law school and, for some of you, going to law school plus holding a job. These struggles have been punctuated by agonizing failures, or fear of failures, as well as by euphoria-inducing successes. Some of your successes have been highlighted by drama, as in the very tense and personal moments before and after the bar examinations. Some have been capped by very serious ceremonies, as when you were conferred your law degrees by your various universities and colleges, and now this most formal occasion the public petition to admit all of you for membership in the Philippine bar and to allow you all to take your oath of office before the Supreme Court En Banc. The ceremony and the drama, which ubiquitously attend the stay of anyone in law school until the lawyers oath is taken, underscore what everyone in Filipino society implicitly understands: that in a population of nearly 100 million people, only a few, very few in relative terms in fact, only 1 out of every

100,000 will be new entrants to the profession of law. This privileged position that has been conferred on you, together with the struggles that you have gone through to make it up to here, therefore makes it imperative that you be able to define a purpose for yourselves as new lawyers. This privilege to be among the elite group of new lawyers is associated with the enormous resources public and private, emotional, mental, material and temporal that have gone into your education, and then into your preparation for and undertaking of the bar examinations. If I were to propose an accounting of what have been expended to allow you to enjoy this day, and eventually to sign your names in the roll of Philippine attorneys, I would enumerate the relevant items of cost in the following manner: (a) those that were exacted from you, your parents and relatives, your special someone, and your barkadas to enable you to obtain a bachelors degree in a required undergraduate course and then in law; (b) similarly, those exacted from your law school teachers and all your previous teachers to mold you into the person that you are and the professional that you are about to become; (c) the maintenance by the Supreme Court, and thus by the Filipino taxpayer, of an Office of the Bar Confidant, which has to be maintained not only for the period of the actual duration of the bar examinations, but all year round; (d) the cost of participation in the preparation and post-examination analyses by your deans and faculty, officers of the Supreme Court and other resource persons, as well by the Members of the Court themselves; and (e) the attention of an entire nation, including the media, to the new crop of lawyers, its topnotchers and other carriers of human-interest stories, as well as its anxiety over what all of this could portend for the future of the country. Simply thinking of the sheer magnitude of the resources that have been provided for all of you on a sustained basis cannot but make all of you feel

grateful. And I request that we pause for a few seconds to thank from deep within our hearts all of those who made this day possible. Such gratitude will expand our vistas and allow our mortal hearts, in love and gratitude, to think more deeply about those who have cared about us and whom we care about. It allows the soul to rise to greater heights. From these expanded vistas, and hearts made more generous by gratitude, naturally follows the inevitable question: Was it all worth it? Was all the blood, sweat and tears worth this singular moment and lifetime of brotherhood and sisterhood in the Philippine bar? I think that the question of worth can only be answered by a further question: Who will evaluate that worth? For those of you whose parents or your own jobs financed your legal education, including the preparation for the bar examinations, it would be attractive to analyze worth in terms similar to those for analyzing returns on private investments. For those of you who were educated through private and public scholarships, and public subsidy for state schools, the question of worth needs to be answered in terms of whether the public is able to reap an adequate return on their investments in you. I believe, however, that all of you, even those whose education was privately financed, cannot escape the conclusion: that an investment in education, and especially in legal education, would have been worth it only if the product of the investment the lawyer has given back to society the fruits of justice and of righteous living. For too long a time, our profession has reaped the scorn of some of our countrymen. It has been saved only by the occasional oases of the stories of heroic individuals among us. These are the individuals who have been pushed by fate into the spotlight and, under such scrutiny, have clearly demonstrated what nobility, courage and integrity mean. Most of the time, the Filipino public feeds on sad, angry jokes about corrupt and overbearing

lawyers. In large part, we have been characterized as selfish, untruthful, and arrogant as carrying ourselves with a false sense of entitlement. This public perception must stop. And I ask the batch of new lawyers 2013 to engage in a counter-cultural revolution to bring about the reversal of this public view of lawyers. While leadership on this matter has to come from the Supreme Court, as the constitutional body with the legal and moral duty to ensure that the legal profession keep to its code of ethics, this revolution if it is to succeed must be infused with the energetic blood of the young and lifted by the heights of their creativity and imagination. It is no small matter if each of you will say in your heart: "I will not be corrupt, and I will allow no one to corrupt me." The Supreme Court will undertake steps, both small and big, to assure the public that the Court is worthy of public trust, and that it is institutionalizing integrity in the professional and personal lives of judges and other court personnel. You would have heard by now that the Court En Banc has just dismissed four judges stationed in Cebu who engaged in activities that commercialized marriage solemnization and annulment. We have been implementing stricter measures not only in the discharge of judicial functions, but also in the fiduciary duties of clerks of courts and sheriffs regarding filing fees and properties in custodia legis. We will be exerting positive pressure on the integrated bar to provide more legal aid to the poor, and we are in fact seriously reviewing the rules on compulsory legal aid to be rendered by every lawyer. We have also been expediting the resolution of disciplinary cases against lawyers. Once the technology has been set up and the human resource capabilities established, we will set up several systems that will equip us to receive complaints against all members of the bar, in the judiciary and outside of it, in a more efficient way. And we will undertake honest-to-goodness investigations of meritorious complaints, either in addition to or in replacement of

the existing systems that we already have. Before the Court En Banc are several proposals that will underscore public accountability. Do not be discouraged by the fact that system changes need time to design, to start, to take root, to monitor and refine before anyone can claim success. Do not let the slowness of change in the system delay your own individual ways of holding yourselves accountable to your oath of office. Remember that once you take the crooked path, its slippery snares will make it difficult for you to go back to the right one. So, do not ever take the first step to commit an unethical, immoral or illegal conduct. Stand your ground and do what is right - for your sake, for the sake of your batch mates, and for the sake of your generation and future generations. On my part, I am here, together with my colleagues, to always encourage you, guide you with whatever measure we can provide and demonstrate to you by our own individual lives the meaning of courage and integrity. We will create systems by which you can reach out to us in the Supreme Court and we in turn can reach out to you. We need mutual encouragement in the path to do good, to build our country, and redeem our profession from the ugly caricature of lawyers that our fellowmen have drawn. This mutual encouragement can also take the form of your active participation in the concrete steps we will be taking towards reforming judicial and legal service. One of the concrete steps to improve judicial service is the inevitable move to integrate information technology with judicial services. We are already creating the backbone for an e-filing system; we have just approved the full roll-out of a pilot electronic court system in Quezon City; and you know that we are already podcasting oral arguments that take place in the Supreme Court. We are currently studying e-notification systems, mobile case status updates, and other proposals to make information on judicial processes more user-

friendly. These efforts will be on top of systems upgrades that we will be undertaking in our internal administrative processes. While these enumerated reforms are exciting for you because you are young and you love IT, note that undergirding many of these changes will be necessary changes to our rules of procedure. I encourage you to participate in the many discussions on judicial reform that will take place; your energy and creativity are most welcome. It must not only be the Supreme Court that will own these improvements; all the stakeholders of the justice system must embrace them as well. Finally, my friends, look at things always from the long view: whether your long view includes eternity, or simply the history of mankind and the Filipino race. No people, no country, has ever gained self-respect much less the respect of its neighbors and the world without the sacrificial spirit of a noble warrior class. Ours is a profession of warriors. Our weapons are not physical, for they consist of words and ideas, and lives lived with integrity. If we demonstrate nobility in all our actions steadfastness in righteous practices, and if we require the rendering of justice not only by others but most especially and most consistently by ourselves, we would enjoy that deep satisfaction of a life well-lived; of a heart that has been poured out for others; of a spirit that has soared high because it has adhered to the call of genuine service and has allowed its flesh to die to its vainglory that others may live. To the warrior class of Batch 2013, congratulations, mabuhay, and may God bless you and your family!