Philippine law practice amidst ASEAN integration: challenges and opportunities

Hideaki Roy Umetsu is a partner at Mori Hamada & Matsumoto. He focuses on international and domestic M&A transactions, global compliance matters, including anti-corruption complaince, internal investigation, or corporate govenance for oversea subsidiaries. He also gives advice on export controls and other trade-related matters. He was admitted to the bars in Japan (2004) and New York (2010). Umetsu was educated at the University of Tokyo (LL.B., 2003) and the University of Chicago Law School (LL.M., 2009). From 2006 to 2007, he worked as an associate director at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan, and he also worked as a foreign associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell from 2009 to 2010.

Andre C. Palacios specializes in international law, ASEAN law, and infrastructure law on public–private partnerships (PPPs). He is an assistant law professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) and a professorial lecturer in international law at the Philippine Judicial Academy. He is the UP ASEAN Law Program Director and, concurrently, the Executive Director of the ASEAN Law Institute of the ASEAN Law Association. He chairs the International Law Committee of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and the Philippine Bar Association. He is a partner at LGTON LAW. University of the Philippines, Bachelor of Laws (1998); University College London, University of London, Master of Laws (Public International Law), with Merit (2006), British Chevening Scholar. https://law.upd.edu.ph/profile/faculty-palaciosandre/

Atty. Kelvin Lester K. Lee is a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines. He is Co-Chair of the ASEAN Working Committee on Capital Market Development (WC-CMD) and serves as a Board Member of the ASEAN Taxonomy Board (ATB) on Sustainable Finance. He also chairs the Financial Sector Forum Inter-agency TWG developing the Philippine green and sustainable finance taxonomy. He was selected as a Lee Kuan Yew Senior Fellow in Public Service of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore. He was recognized as a “Blockchain Champion” by the Blockchain Council of the Philippines and was recently awarded as “Outstanding FinTech Regulatory and Technology Innovation Leader in the Philippines” during the Asian Digital Finance Forum and Awards 2023 organized by the Asian Fintech Academy.

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Patricia Ngochua’s practice focuses on general corporate matters as well as the more specialized areas in corporate law. She has been involved in securities, capital markets, corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, foreign investments, energy and infrastructure projects, mining, telecommunications, real estate, and FinTech related transactions, and has advised and represented several publicly-listed companies, multinational firms, financial institutions, PE funds, domestic and foreign investors in these practice areas.