Key team members: Millette Asuncion-Arnedo, Lindeza R. Gavino, Ma. Ruiza Hernane, Roman S. Esguerra, Farrah B. Veloso, Florida K. Fomaneg, Renato R. Vehemente, Ma. Victoria Beltran, Lourdes A. Ona   

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos, and give us a breakdown of what makes your legal team function so well? 

As an in-house team for the Filinvest Group, we adopt the preventive lawyering principle. This means that the team is proactively working with clients to ensure that issues do not arise in the future concerning projects they are introducing. This means that clients come to us at the ideation stage of strategies so that when it is completed and launched, we are already able to put in the controls required to ensure that such is compliant with laws and regulations and can address some if not all, risks associated with the same.     

The key to keeping this kind of relationship with clients is ensuring that the team is seen as enablers instead of nay-sayers. This does not mean that we always say YES, even if the proposal/s of clients are not acceptable from the legal point of view. If the proposal is not legally sound, we present ways to enable clients to achieve their objectives, even if it means changing how they accomplish the same. This entails a different skill from the lawyers in our team, as we need to be more pragmatic in how we support our clients.  

Compliance is critical to the legal team’s job because we have multiple listed companies within the Group. Hence, this is one area where the various legal teams in the Group work together to ensure that nobody is left behind and that all companies benefit from the process enhancement that one of our companies adopts.  

We have clients with high standards with respect to legal services. This makes our jobs not easy, but certainly more satisfying. Because when the clients achieve their goals, we have achieved ours as well.  

While most of the legal work is done in-house, we also occasionally need help from external counsel. For this, we choose firms with an enabling approach to ensure the achievement of the goals of the businesses we support.