ANNA Mae Yu Lamentillo, a proud Bisaya, has passed the 2025 Bar Examination on her first try—an achievement she says is rooted in a promise she made to her father in their final conversation in 2017.
In a social media post after the results were released, she wrote: “Eight years ago, in 2017, my dad and I had our last conversation. Before he passed, I promised him I’d become a lawyer. I’ve carried that promise with me ever since—quietly, stubbornly, even on the days I wasn’t sure I could finish what I started.” She added that she continued reviewing even while overseas: “I brought law books with me to Oxford and studied in between everything because I couldn’t let that promise fade.”
Taking the exam, she said, was filled with memory and emotion: “This was my first time taking the bar, and I walked into it thinking of him the whole way through.”
When she finally saw her name on the list, she marked the moment simply: “Today, more than 8 years later, I finally get to put Atty. before my name. Dad, I kept my word. You can finally rest in peace.”
Beyond the bar, Lamentillo has also been amplifying Bisaya identity and linguistic preservation on the global stage. Speaking in Munich at the One Young World Conference, she introduced herself as a Filipino from the Karay-a ethnolinguistic group in Western Visayas. Recalling childhood struggles with English and being mocked for her accent and stutter, she said her mother’s Kinaray-a proverbs helped her find her voice: “On nights when my tongue felt locked… my mouth would loosen to the sounds – familiar, ours.”
The experience shaped her advocacy: “My struggle taught me; words are not equal. Language is not fair.” She later challenged the tech sector’s language gap, sharing: “When I tried speaking Kinaray-a to ChatGPT, it did not respond,” and asking, “How can we call technology that only understands less than one percent of the world’s languages fair and responsible?”
Lamentillo graduated from UP Los Baños in 2012 with Latin honors and the Faculty Medal for Academic Excellence, earned her Juris Doctor from UP Diliman in 2020, completed executive education at Harvard Kennedy School in 2018, finished her MSc in Cities at LSE with honors in July 2025, and is currently pursuing an MSc in Major Programme Management at the University of Oxford. PR