E-courts rising

Congratulations to the soon-to-be-minted lawyers who hurdled the 2019 Bar exams. After you take your oath and sign the roll of attorneys, I would say, welcome to the legal profession! The operative act which makes one a lawyer is the signing of the roll of attorneys. During my time 10 years ago, we did it at the old Supreme Court session hall in Padre Faura, Manila.

In the time of COVID-19, the traditional mass oath-taking at the Philippine International Convention Center is most likely to be cancelled in lieu of virtual or online oath-taking. In fact, the president of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, Atty. Domingo Egon Cayosa, in an interview with Bombo Radyo Cauayan, has broached the idea of online oath-taking in view of the ban against mass gatherings. The roll-signing, on the other hand, can be arranged electronically, I guess.

These things are unimaginable back in our time, but we are now in unprecedented times. Unprecedented times call for previously unimaginable solutions.

As a cue of things to come, Senior Associate Justice Estela M. Perlas-Bernabe, chairwoman of the 2019 Committee on Bar Examinations, announced the summative result of the Bar examinations last Wednesday over YouTube. “Out of the 7,685 candidates who completed the Bar examinations, 2,103 examinees or 27.36 percent passed,” Justice Perlas-Bernabe said.

She added: “In arriving at this result, the Court En Banc decided to lower the passing rate from 75 percent to 74 percent in light of, among other considerations, the discerned need for more (number of) younger and technologically-adept lawyers to help different fronts of society as we meet the peculiar challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and transition to the new normal.”

By the way, lowering the passing rate a notch or two is not new in the history of the Bar Exams. It usually happens when sticking to the 75 percent passing rate would result to an exceptionally low percentage of passers. It recognizes that Bar Exam grading is subjective – that despite a set of standards and guidelines for more consistent scoring, many factors still play into the grading, among them the examiner’s own knowledge, standards, and priorities in deciding how to score an answer.

The need for the courts to perform their duties does not stop with the pandemic. In fact, the Supreme Court was one of those vital institutions that quickly came up with guidelines and advisories at the onset of the community quarantine last March.

We in the legal profession know that we no longer can do much in advancing court proceedings and dispute resolution because of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ). Yet the courts are still able to maintain a skeleton workforce for very urgent matters, particularly in criminal cases.

The Supreme Court has also permitted the online filing of criminal complaints and information, posting of bail, and submission of other urgent pleadings until May 15, when the ECQ is expected to be lifted. Last week, I was able to submit an urgent motion through the official email address of the Regional Trial Court in Bais City, to which the court gave due course.

In a circular issued last Monday, the Supreme Court announced that hearings of criminal cases through videoconferencing will be pilot-tested in selected cities, including the cities of Cebu, Mandaue, and Lapu-Lapu. This is to further restrain the movement and travel of court users, detainees, judges, and court personnel in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 amid reports of infection of some detention prisoners.

With the new normal, courts must be better suited to enhance their electronic capabilities. There will be concerns, of course, especially among traditionalists or from the old school about the integrity of work and interactions in the legal system done by electronic means.

But these concerns have long been extensively studied in the area of international trade and commerce. In a 103-page paper published in 2009 by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), legal issues on international use of electronic authentication and signature methods were extensively explored.

If only to push us to adopt new rules and procedures that are previously unimaginable, here’s sobering news from the New York Post. Three judges died and nearly 170 employees from New York’s court system fell ill to the coronavirus. They are some of the state’s 16,000 court employees who continued to show up for work at courthouses throughout the pandemic.