Nothing about the legalities of the movie is accurate in the actual legal profession in the Philippines. It reeks of procedural infirmities in Criminal Procedure and Evidence and so many unethical conduct that should not have been sanctioned to begin with as follows:
1. Documents presented are not properly authenticated and were presented in trial, when it should've been presented in pre-trial.
2. The only ground that the lawyers know about when they object to certain questions are grounds of irrelevance. There were A LOT of questions that could have been objected to by other grounds.
3. Atticus Co., a law firm, should have been a General Partnership by law but is apparently a non-stock corporation held by the board of trustees.
4. There were a lot of unethical behavior sanctioned in the film (disclosure of evidence adverse to the client is a violation of a lawyer's fiduciary duty; conflict of interest of dating adverse counsels should extend not only to the counsel but the firm that he is affiliated with).
5. For the love of God, why is a private lawyer doing all the heavy work? He should have been coordinating with the public prosecutor or the fiscal who is the one who should ACTUALLY be supervising the case.
6. The case was dismissed because they couldn't produce a witness to testify a police report. In this case, that's kind of irrelevant and the lawyer should have struck down the unwilling witness from the witness list from the pretrial brief.
It seems that the movie lacked the appropriate budget to hire an actual lawyer to stand as a legal consultant or if they did hire one, they're not doing a good job.
It must be noteworthy that the practice of law is imbued with public interest and the bastardization of the profession's ethics and practice by this abomination of a movie is simply inexcusable for me, a lawyer, to ignore. If the movie is guilty about anything it's the murder of the legal profession in one movie.
