MANILA — AI adoption in legal work is exploding across Asia, but the real bottleneck is trust: authoritative data, verification, governance and measurable value.
A new 2026 LexisNexis survey of 1,715 legal professionals across 10 Asia-Pacific markets found that 94 percent now use AI in their everyday legal work, up from 88 percent a year earlier.
But the same survey points to a problem that could determine whether legal AI becomes genuinely useful or simply another source of risk.
Some 63 percent cite accuracy and hallucination as their leading concern. Only 58 percent say their organizations have an AI policy, while 69 percent say they would use AI more if it were delivered through guided workflows.
That trust question is becoming harder to ignore in the legal profession.
Thomson Reuters says 41 percent of law firms and 47 percent of corporate legal departments were using generative AI in 2026, compared with 28 percent and 23 percent, respectively, in 2025. But its 2026 Future of Professionals research also found that 34 percent of law-firm professionals use AI tools their firms have not authorized.
For Philippine startup AnyCase.ai, that is precisely where the business opportunity begins.
Founder and CEO Beato Bongco tells ANC's Startup with Ron Cruz that the company's original idea was simple: build a smarter search engine for Philippine law.
But the team quickly discovered that the bigger problem was not the chatbot. It was the information underneath it.
“Legal data in the Philippines is super fragmented. It's under-digitized and it's under-tooled.”
Bongco says AnyCase has had to collect information from different government agencies, sometimes going beyond digital searches to obtain physical documents.
In one case, he says an information request took eight months. In another, the company paid P11,000 for 22 pages of documents, after being charged P500 per page.
Those are company-reported experiences, not independently verified national averages, but they illustrate the data-access challenge AnyCase says it is trying to solve.
The Philippine government is already dealing with a massive volume of public-information requests. The official Freedom of Information portal currently lists more than 271,232 requests across 739 government agencies.
And the stakes are high.
The Philippine Supreme Court adopted its Governance Framework on the Use of Human-Centered Augmented Intelligence in February 2026. The framework calls for human oversight, accountability, transparency, traceability and auditable AI systems, while stressing that AI should support rather than replace human judgment.
Just last month, Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen warned lawyers and law students about uncritical AI use, including the risk of fabricated cases, citations and misinterpretation of real legal authorities.
AnyCase says it is building around that same principle.
The startup employs lawyers to vet documents and evaluate its system. Its platform provides clickable citations so users can trace an answer back to its legal source.
Bongco says one lawyer gave the company a blunt test:
“I don't care if your AI gets the answer right. I need a source or else I can't use it.”
The startup says it had 14,000 users last month, more than half of them paid subscribers, and that its user base has roughly doubled from the previous year.
Bongco says the company charges $9.99 a month after a free tier, with pricing designed around the time lawyers can save on legal research. The company says a survey of its users found they save roughly 14 hours a week.
For Bongco, however, the bigger prize is not simply selling software to lawyers.
He wants the technology to eventually help make legal services more accessible and affordable to ordinary Filipinos.
That ambition comes as the country's digital economy continues to expand. The Philippine Statistics Authority says the digital economy generated ₱2.74 trillion in gross value added in 2025, equivalent to 9.8 percent of GDP, up 5.4 percent from 2024.
But Bongco's pitch is not that AI should replace lawyers. He describes AnyCase as an “Iron Man suit” for a lawyer, technology designed to augment one person's capabilities rather than remove the person from the process.
And that may be the more important question for legal AI: not whether machines can produce an answer, but whether professionals can trust the answer enough to act on it.