SENATOR ANGARA: SUPERMAN-LAWYER DOESNT FLY ANYMORE

The age of the all-knowing, expert superman-lawyer is over, according to Sen. Edgardo J. Angara.
Specialization, aggravated by globalization, has pushed the great generalists to the side, said Angara in a talk about the future of the
teaching of law at the University of the Philippines College of Law on Friday.
UP Law, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, must adapt to the rapidly changing trends in the legal profession, most
notably the shift toward specialization, Angara said in a lecture titled Examining the Role of UP Law.
Like doctors and engineers, more and more lawyers are being hired for their expertise in chosen fields rather than for being jacks-of-alltrades who try to master everything, said the senator, who chairs the UP Law Centennial Commission.
He quoted the 2010 Financial Times Global Education Report, which said: In todays world, the superman-lawyerone who knows
everything about anything (or at least claims to)is viewed with skepticism and disregarded in favor of the specialist.
Those who know more about a narrower field, indeed, offer a tremendous advantage to business in legal conflicts. And if a business in
legal trouble wants to cover its flanks, it should hire specialists in other fields, Angara said.
It is like that in warfare, and business is war, he added.
For UP Law to continue producing graduates of the caliber of its distinguished alumni would largely depend on the colleges ability to
evolve its teaching methods to meet the changing and mounting challenges facing the practice of the profession, Angara said.
UP Law counts among its graduates four presidentsManuel Roxas, Jose P. Laurel, Elpidio Quirino and Ferdinand Marcosthree vice
presidents, including the incumbent Jejomar Binay, and 12 chief justices of the Supreme Court. Eight incumbent senators, including
Angara, are also alumni of the college.
Global law schools
Another challenge, the worst one facing the legal profession, has been the economic crisis of 2008 whose effects linger to this day,
Angara said.
When the crisis hit, the first to go in corporate spending programs, after advertising, was the legal budget, he said.
Frankly, it has always been like that. When a lawyer wins a case, the client thinks he was always right anyway. When a lawyer loses a
case, its the lawyers fault for losing a winning cause, he said, drawing chuckles from the audience that included legal luminaries,
professors and law students.
As a result of advances in computer technology, law education is also vulnerable to computerization, he said, attributing this to the fact
that the law, by its nature, is and should be routine and repetitive.
Soon fields of legal learning and practice can be packaged and sold like movies on DVD or, worse, pirated versions, he said.
The senator said there was no way to fight this trend but to go with it.
Angara pointed out that the Harvard Law School emphasizes its ability to offer joint degree programs, which allow students to earn
another degree from any of its other professional schools, similar to the strategy of Yale Law School, which boasts an interdisciplinary
approach to the teaching of law.
This is the age of global law schools. Opportunities to study abroad are no longer a part of a grant but a component of the mainstream
curriculum, he said, citing Harvard Laws exchange programs with schools in Tokyo, Geneva and Shanghai, among other places.
PH fears competition
Unfortunately, the Philippines remains untouched by this trend, Angara said.
Philippine teaching and practice of law remain impervious to it. Our profession firmly discourages foreign entanglements. Foreign legal
scholars may not teach credited courses in Philippine law schools, let alone practice before our courts, he said.
You can go, if you want, to take your masters abroad, but it will have a negligible, if any, effect on your practice back home. You can
take the bar in New York but not in Manila. The Philippine legal profession, despite its evident talents, fears international competition,
he said.
Angara challenged UP Law to adopt such novel approaches to the teaching of law. I believe that this time, the UP College of Law can
lead, rather than follow, in meeting these challenges, he said.
To protect good men
He concluded his lecture with a reminder: Law schools are not established to create great men for great moments, but to make
excellent everyday lawyers to protect good men in the ordinary course of the law.

Those who, from that everyday but necessary vocation, rise to greatness will owe their eminence not to the school they attended, but
to the conscience, values and wisdom they acquired on their own, Angara said.

LAWYERS RISE, ASEAN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION IS HERE

It was the farthest in the minds of the graduating class of Ateneo Law School whom I addressed in 2010. The resolution in the Cebu
Summit was to accelerate the Asean Vision 2020 of a single economic unit, characterized by free movement of goods, services,
investment, skilled labor and freer flow of capital, to 2015. But I warned them then and urged them to prepare for the coming Asean
practice of law.
Today, with 2015 just around the corner, the Asean Economic Community is the talk of the town. While some claim that the Philippines
is not at all ready to be in such a region, others, en contra, maintain that we can be, provided we make the right moves with the little
time left. But certainly, unlike a decade ago, those with strong opinions, when taken as a group, far outnumber those who are
unconcerned or simply clueless.
I propose in this piece to share some insights which are the fruits of the more than half a century that I have devoted to the practice of
law in the Philippines.
A salient, though silent, feature of the private practice of law in the Philippines is the belief of clients, rightly or wrongly, that their lawyer
knows, or ought to knowknow not in the pejorative sense of knowing the judge, but in the legitimate expectation that the lawyers to
whom they pay good money, know not only what the law says but, in a degree that is a notch or two above the resthow to deal with
the law in a manner that will be advantageous to them.
This demand on lawyers is multiplied a hundredfold by clients who do or plan to do investments. When I spoke to the Ateneo graduates
in 2010, direct foreign investments and loans in the Asean totaled roughly $346,187 million in 2008, up from only $23,541 million in
2000. Exports for the same period doubled; imports rose from $348,960 million to $831,229 million. Figures have gone north on a steep
trajectory since then.
The impact of this development on the legal profession is inevitable. Lawyers are a necessary evil in assisting in the negotiation and
crafting of agreements of interested parties. Hence, a great demand for legal services in the whole of Asean lurks around the corner.
Country barriers to knowledge of inter-Asean law, though not necessarily license to practice in all, is a necessity.
This is not a pipe dream or a visionary prophecy; the germinal elements of such a development are already here. The same forces that
unleashed the lowering of trade barriers will push cross-border practice in our region. We must therefore prepare for the inevitable by
developing now a corps of skilled lawyers that can measure up to the demand.
But how do we do that? I submit that the Philippine legal profession can do so in a pragmatic way, taking our cue from the way the West
dealt at one point with its need to invest in China. At that time I observed, when it was in fashion to have offices in China, that
multinational law firms had been hiring in New York our former associates for posting in Hong Kong and Singapore, to involve them in
servicing their clients interest in China and Asean. The move made good sense because we Filipinos have several unique advantages:
We speak English, we have an Asean face, and, most significant, we have trained in the two great legal systems of the worldthe Civil
and Roman law which we inherited from Spain and the Anglo-American common law brought here by the Americans.
I therefore exhort young lawyers (any lawyer less than my age is by definition young) to spread their wings, after a few years of
working locally by way of giving back, and seek engagement, if not employment, with multinational firms with branch offices in Asean
and/or China. The learning and training they will receive and the contacts and contracts they will make will serve them well personally.
Also, when intra-Asean practice becomes the new normal, they will constitute the skilled manpower (and womanpower) that the
Philippines will require to be a meaningful participant in the opportunities that will take place in such an unprecedented event as Asean
economic integration.
As intimated earlier, the groundswell has begun. Our firms former associates are presently employed by multinational law firms, and
they are assigned to their respective offices in New York, Sydney, Paris, Belgium, the Hague, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Singapore.
There is no reason to believe that the same phenomenon is not happening in the other big law firms in the country. And there certainly
is no justification why the movement will not be inclusive of all in the Philippine legal profession.
It is my hope that while there is still time, Philippine lawyers will decide to ride in front of the Asean wave. Otherwise, we will be ceding
the dominance of the forthcoming cross-border Asean practice of law to lawyers of other countries. That would be a pity because the
potential for legal services in the Asean alone is tremendous. I would hate to see us lose it by default.
Ricardo J. Romulo is a senior partner of Romulo Mabanta Buenaventura Sayoc & De Los Angeles.