Karlo Dizon, a Filipino lawyer and technologist, built Kartilya.PH to solve a problem he saw in his own family: people who need legal help often cannot get it because they do not know where to start. The free platform combines a structured archive of Philippine legal materials with an AI search engine that lets users ask questions in plain language.
Dizon, who was born in Bataan and now works between New York, the Philippines, and Guam, said the law should not feel like an exclusive resource. "The law is a public resource," he said. "It's publicly available." But making it publicly available is not the same as making it accessible, he argued.
How Kartilya works
The platform runs on a "structured corpus" containing more than 8,000 provisions, the 1987 Constitution, major codes, statutes, rules, court decisions from the LawPhil project, and a jurisprudence catalog of 4,164 records from 2019 through April 29, 2026. Instead of searching the open web like a general chatbot, the system is bounded to Philippine legal materials only.
"Instead of having an unbounded LLM that searches its entire corpus of information, you have a more bounded LLM that searches only legal information - Philippine law in this case," Dizon said.
Kartilya also adds a verification layer to address AI hallucinations. "We added a verification layer where every single proposition that is presented to you is linked to an actual source [that you can look at]," Dizon said. The AI checks the source before presenting it to the user.
Dizon acknowledged the system can still make mistakes. Legal language is precise, and small differences in wording can matter. An AI may treat words as interchangeable when a lawyer would not. Users are encouraged to check the underlying primary sources themselves.
For privacy, search queries are hashed into non-readable keys and deleted after about seven days. Public queries are never stored or viewed by the team.
AI as a gateway, not a replacement
Dizon does not see AI replacing lawyers. He sees it bringing more people into the legal system - and creating more work for the profession. Someone might use the platform to understand a family property contract or get a basic sense of their rights in a landlord dispute. But when the matter involves criminal liability, large sums of money, or complex litigation, the need for a lawyer grows.
"Just because people understand the legal process doesn't mean that they have the time or the ability to go through the whole rigmarole of litigation," he said. There are filings, evidence collection, depositions, and cases to pursue.
Better access to information could make legal services more competitive and affordable, Dizon said. It could also make the legal system less frightening. Even the threat of a lawsuit can intimidate someone into abandoning a claim they have a legal right to pursue.
The platform is still early. Dizon said Kartilya has a few hundred regular users and positive feedback. One recurring problem: a search leads a user to a judicial opinion or code provision, and they hit another wall of difficult legal language. The team's next step is to put AI tools directly on opinion and code pages so users can ask questions about specific provisions. Language accessibility is also on the roadmap, including Tagalog.
Kartilya is built by a small team of about four full-time people, plus interns and volunteers. The team has been developing it for about a year. Rein Serrano is the tech lead, a full-stack software engineer at Manulife and graduate of Ateneo de Manila University.
For legal professionals, the broader lesson may be about how the profession itself adapts. Dizon believes law schools should not ban AI outright. "I think the reality is all the lawyers and all the judges are going to be using AI," he said. The question is how students learn to reason and write effectively while using it - and whether schools create spaces, like AI labs, where they can practice.
He is also exploring a version of Kartilya for legislative use, which could give congressional offices better tools for legal research and bill drafting, and establish traceability of legal documents.
Why this matters for legal professionals
Legal professionals should watch how bounded AI tools like Kartilya change the entry point to legal services. The platform does not replace legal judgment, but it lowers the barrier for people who would otherwise skip legal help entirely. That means more potential clients entering the system, and it means lawyers may need to get comfortable working alongside tools that cite primary sources and verify claims. The same shift is coming to law school curricula and legislative work, so familiarity with these systems is becoming a practical skill rather than an optional one.
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