Law and behold: They're women!

Do women make better lawyers?

MANILA, Philippines - Some of the most important people manning the oars at the Villaraza Cruz Marcelo and Angangco law office (CVCLAW) are women. In fact, the highest ranking of them, Sylvette Tankiang, is a single mother with six children! She is also the firm’s co-managing partner, chief finance officer and the only woman who sits in the seven-member executive committee of CVCLAW.

“I was lucky that I had my parents,” Sylvette shares the secret to her almost perfect balancing act. “I had to live with my parents. They acted as pseudo-parents whenever I was not around. It also helped that I’m a lawyer working in an environment that allows you to manage yourself and your own time. You don’t work here 8 to 5. So I can still attend parent-teacher conferences. I made sure I was active in the parents’ council because somebody told me, ‘Your children would love you more if you’re involved in their school activities’.”

“I must admit that here in the Philippines, we have a support system, we have assistants. There’s what you call delegation of work and that’s how you manage as a single mother at home and maybe that’s also how I manage lawyers in a team. You can’t do everything yourself, you delegate to the best person who can do it,” she reveals.

F. Arthur “Pancho” Villaraza, CVCLAW’s managing partner and one of the firm’s founders, firmly believes that women make good lawyers because of their eye for detail.

“They attend to so many details that men don’t do,” says Villaraza, who graduated third in the UP College of Law in 1975. “The men concentrate on seeing the forest. They forget the leaves and the branches and the twigs. And those are what women see.”

Sylvette is well known for her eye for detail in providing creative solutions to complex legal problems. She graduated summa cum laude from the De La Salle University – Manila with a degree in A.B. Honors, Major in Economics. After college, she enrolled in the University of the Philippines College of Law, where she graduated valedictorian and cum laude.

A few years after receiving her masters of law from the Harvard Law School, Sylvette joined Carpio Villaraza and Cruz, now known as Villaraza Cruz Marcelo and Angangco (CVCLAW). She has been with CVCLAW for more than 20 years now.

Despite the legal profession being a male-dominated world — perhaps not in numbers but in clout — Sylvette is recognized as one of the best tax and commercial law practitioners in the country.

“I never made gender an issue in my life because when I work, I only think I’m competing with myself, my target. I don’t see the sexes,” says Sylvette.

Aside from Sylvette, CVCLAW or “The Firm” boasts several other women topnotch lawyers, including senior partners Patricia Bunye and Thea Daep and partners Franchete Acosta and Divina Gracia Pedron. Most of them use their maiden names in their business cards. Divine is single.

Trish & Thea

Patricia “Trish” Bunye heads CVCLAW’s Mining and Natural Resources and Power and Energy practice groups, and is a partner in its Intellectual Property Department. She is currently a vice president of the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), an international organization of professionals involved in the business of Intellectual Property, an endeavour outside the office that the firm supports.

In her mining and natural resources practice, she is recognized as among the foremost mining lawyers in the Philippines. In the 2012 edition of the Chambers directory, Trish is cited as “an excellent strategist with a solid understanding of the industry.”

An expert on licensing, she has spoken in many countries, including Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, on IP licensing matters in the Philippines. She is also frequently consulted by the Philippine Intellectual Property Office and the Department of Science and Technology on these matters.

Asked how she has reached the top of the totempole in the firm, Trish says: “Within the firm, I think we have succeeded because there’s meritocracy. We’re all judged on what we’re able to do and contribute to the firm. And secondly, within society in general, I’ve never felt that there was a glass ceiling for women. Never felt it. My feeling is that you really need to do your best, give it your all and things naturally follow from that. It’s not a matter of gender, it’s what you contribute.”

“Nothing takes the place of hard work and earning your stripes,” Trish stresses. 

Her job is filled with challenges, especially with the current raging, sometimes emotional, debate on mining.

“And I see it as part of my job to contribute to that discussion because personally, I do feel that mining is essential to a progressive country. But it always has to be within parameters of environmental protection. You make sure that all the stakeholders are given their due. Every day, I learn something new,” Trish, wife of PCSO general manager Jose Ferdinand “Joy” Rojas II, says.

“I must give credit to my husband who is 100 percent supportive and who gives me the freedom and space to do what I need to do,” she adds.

Like Villaraza and the other women lawyers in the firm, Trish says women have built-in strengths.

“A woman is generally more meticulous and pays attention to even small details.  Women also are generally more empathetic and have better EQ, which allows them to read situations more keenly even if there is no verbal communication,” she points out.

 Thea, another senior partner, is the lone female partner in the firm’s Litigation and Dispute Resolution Department and specializes in civil and criminal litigation, intra-corporate controversies and corporate restructuring, reorganization and insolvency.

Thea has extensive experience in family law, torts and damages and contracts enforcement. Her accomplishments in family law litigation includes her win before the Supreme Court in a landmark case on the novel issue of whether a dual citizen may re-litigate issues on property settlement here in the Philippines by means of a petition for dissolution of marriage after having previously secured a divorce in the United States. Denying the petition and ruling in favor of her client, the Supreme Court upheld the foreign divorce and property settlement. 

On how she made it in a man’s world, Thea says, “ I suppose you can never argue against competence. You develop your competence through hardwork. And you will definitely succeed.”

“In my case, when you’re in trial arguing against male lawyers who are older than you and you have this machismo, you just do your best. And when I go to litigation, I am never timid,” she adds

Thea is once again at the forefront of a controversial family dispute involving as it does the scions of landed families, where she represents Susana Madrigal-Bayot Ortigas.

On top of her high-profile and multimillion-peso cases, Thea handles pro bono cases with much zeal. She also handled cases referred by the Department of Social Welfare and Development involving abused women and children. As loving wife to Cenon Laurena IV and mother to toddler Maia Isabelle, Thea sure knows how to have it all. For one, she would bring her baby to work, and just close the door of her office at feeding time.

Franchete & Divine

Franchete is one of the youngest partners in the firm. After completing her master’s degree in Law in NYU, she joined CVCLAW and set out to become partner in one of the biggest law firms in the country.

Franchete specializes in corporate law, with focus on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and finance.

After graduating in Maryknoll High School, she obtained a degree in Business Economics, magna cum laude, from the University of the Philippines. She obtained her law degree, valedictorian and cum laude, also from UP. In 1999, she passed the Bar and ranked third. Her last academic sojourn was in the New York University School of Law, where she completed her masters of law degree on full merit scholarship.

Franchete is married and has a son.

“It’s not like I can’t do my work well because I have a child. I never made it an issue or an excuse to get away with something. That’s also a reason why we don’t feel discriminated against or there’s no bias against women in the firm.

“In terms of numbers, you notice when we’re recruiting from the graduating classes, there are more women who are in the top 10 or 20 than men, consistently over the past few years. So that mirrors how women really perform, that there is a significant number of women,” Franchete points out.

Franchete’s business economics and finance background has served her well. One of the lessons Franchete quickly learned in CVCLAW is that a lawyer cannot be an effective problem solver unless she brings to the table more than just knowledge of the law. A keen understanding of business, finance and politics is vital to the process.

It was in law school that Divine Pedron, a partner in CVCLAW, discovered who she really was and what she could do. “I had no idea that people saw in me something that I didn’t even know existed. One day, at the close of classes in our freshman year, our class president who was already active in school politics announced that it was time to elect a new class president for our second year. Then the next minute, he was nominating me and within the next few moments, I had been elected.” It came as a big surprise to Divine but being class president made her gain confidence. “Because I was class president, I had to deal with professors and students from the other classes for schedules, exams and issues affecting the College of Law.”

Confidence is what Divine has now. One of her more high-profile cases involved the case between ABS-CBN and Willie Revillame (She was the lawyer for ABS-CBN).

When she goes to court, she does not ask if she will be facing off with a male or a female lawyer. “You just find out from what firm he or she comes from. But I don’t worry that my opponent will be a man. It has never entered my mind. It’s not a consideration.”

But she believes that in many instances, women make better lawyers because, “Women are more in tune with their emotions. So when you deal with clients, you’re more patient, more understanding. There’s extra care. If he’s a guy, sometimes he goes directly to business, it’s all black and white.”

Now a partner at CVCLAW, Divine finds herself in a good place. “When I hit 35, I was already that person that I wanted to be.”

What kind of person? “The courageous, independent me. Throw at me anything and I’d take it and convert it into something more exciting, more useful.”

Sylvette, Trish, Thea, Franchete and Divine — they’ve made it not just because they’re women, but because they’re the best in their field. Their femininity is just a bonus.