Corporate Governance & Commercial Law

Atty. Teodoro Kalaw IV is the firm’s Senior Partner. He was admitted to the Philippine Bar in 1998, New York State Bar in 2002, and the Bar of the United States Supreme Court in 2011.  Prior to co-founding and practicing in the law firm of Kalaw Sy Selva & Campos from 2005 to 2019 where he focused on the corporate governance and legal aspects of intellectual property, realty, and securities transactions, commercial litigation, and dispute resolution, and public policy representation, Atty. Kalaw was a senior associate at the intellectual property and information technology practice of the Quisumbing Torres Law Firm, the Manila associate firm of Baker & McKenzie International.  He was seconded to the information technology practice of the Tokyo associate firm of Baker & McKenzie International and was stationed in Tokyo, Japan, from June to September 2002. Since July 2015, he is a Certified Compliance and Ethics Professional – International (CCEP– I) of the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics of the United States.

As one of the first and youngest Fellows of the Philippine Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD), Atty. Kalaw has chaired ICD’s Family-Owned or Controlled Corporations Circle since 2007, where he was primarily responsible for creating and developing ICD’s Governance Framework for Family-Owned or Controlled Corporations as well as the Institute’s model for addressing sustainability at the board-level, now known as the Sustainability Strategy Spectrum. He has counseled and taught on corporate governance both locally and internationally, with the latter aspect particularly as a consultant to the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation for Indonesia in 2012.  A Trustee of the Institute from May 2012 to June 2020, he also serves on its core faculty as Chair of Thought Leadership Committee and is its current Corporate Secretary. In May 2021, he was installed as the Institute’s youngest Life Fellow. He also serves as Corporate Secretary of ICD’s sister learned society for public governance, the Institute for Solidarity in Asia, as well as the Center for Excellence in Governance.  He is also a Graduate Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, from which he obtained his Company Directors Course Diploma in 2010.

He presently serves as an independent board director of the shipping and logistics firm Gothong Southern, and is one of the few Filipinos who are fully certified in the Balanced Scorecard Strategic Performance Management approach by the co-founders of the process, Professors Norton and Kaplan of Harvard Business School. Accredited by the Global Reporting Initiative as the first and currently only Filipino Certified Sustainability Professional, he is also both a Certified Sustainability Practitioner and Certified Sustainability Reporting Assurer of the Institute of Certified Sustainability Practitioners.

He served a judicial clerkship under Justice Vicente V. Mendoza of the Philippine Supreme Court from 1997 to 1998.  Partly in recognition of his performance during his clerkship, the Philippine Civil Service Commission granted him Civil Service Executive Eligibility, the highest grade level in the Philippine Civil Service, at the end of his appointment.

Dispute Resolution

Atty. Kalaw is the first and only Filipino to be installed as a Chartered Arbitrator as well as certified as an Accredited Mediator by the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb) of the United Kingdom. He is also the first and only Filipino diplomate in both international commercial arbitration and mediation of CIArb and is the only Filipino CIArb Fellow in both the international arbitration and mediation disciplines. As a commercial arbitrator, he has or is presently serving as chair, member, or sole arbitrator in domestic and international tribunals that to date cumulatively involve nearly 61.7 billion Pesos in claims. As a mediator within his role as a family business governance counselor for the Institute of Corporate Directors of the Philippines, he has assisted in resolving governance and succession concerns involving as many as four family generations and over fifty separate clan members.

He was the President of the Philippine Institute of Arbitrators (PIArb) in 2014 and 2015 and then the Chair of its Board of Trustees from 2016 to 2017, after previously serving for half a decade as the founding Executive Vice-President of that Institute. In such capacity, he has lectured or presented on various aspects of alternative dispute resolution not only in the Philippines but also throughout the ASEAN region and East Asia.  He is presently a President Emeritus of PIArb as well as the Senior Warden of the Philippine Chapter of the CIArb East Asia Branch headquartered in Hong Kong.  He is among the youngest to be elected a Fellow of CIArb, PIArb, the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators (SIArb), the Hong Kong Institute of Arbitrators (HKIArb), and the Asian Institute of Alternative Dispute Resolution (AIADR). He was a co-editor & contributor to PIArb’s official Commercial Arbitration Handbook published in 2015.

He is an accredited arbitrator of CIArb, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines, the Construction Industry Arbitration Commission of the Philippines, Philippine Dispute Resolution Center, Inc. (PDRCI), the Philippine International Center for Conflict Resolution (PICCR), and the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) regulated by the Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission. He chaired the arbitral tribunal that resolved the first two arbitrations of WESM in 2019. Since October 2015, he is the first and currently only professional neutral accredited in all recognized dispute resolution disciplines (arbitration, mediation, conciliation, early neutral evaluation, mediation-arbitration, and mini-trial) by the Office of Alternative Dispute Resolution (OADR) of the Philippine Government. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of PDRCI since 2017.

As the founding Director since 2017 of the LPU-PIArb Center for the Amicable Resolution of Disputes, the academic arm of PIArb in partnership with the Lyceum of the Philippines University, he is supervising the establishment of the first graduate degree in professional dispute resolution in the Southeast Asian region. In 2019, he began service as the Deputy Secretary-General for Education, Accreditation, and Development of the PICCR, the dispute resolution service provider of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, to oversee the provision of its training, accreditation, and community-peacemaking programs.

Intellectual, Real, & Financial Capital

He served until 2014 as General Counsel of the I.P. Coalition, the leading policy caucus of intellectual property rights stakeholder associations in the Philippines, with member associations across several industries such as entertainment, software, consumer goods, publishing, and licensee retailers.  He was previously Secretary-General of the I.P. Coalition from 2003 to 2008 and a registered patent attorney of the Philippine I.P. Office from 1999 to 2001.

In addition to his professional roles as a licensed real estate consultant, appraiser, and broker, he served as the General Counsel of the Philippine Association of Real Estate Boards (PAREB) in 2008 and has been the General Counsel of the Institute of Philippine Real Estate Appraisers (IPREA) since that same year. He was also a national board member of PAREB in 2008 and, from 2008 to 2010, was also a national board member of IPREA.  He was also the 2007 Past President of the PAREB Rizal Board of Realtors (the 2007 Luzon Best Board of PAREB).  He edited the 2007 edition of the Philippine Real Estate Industry Handbook & Directory.  He was the board topnotcher (first placer) of the 2014 Real Estate Consultant Licensing Exam, the highest class of professional real estate service professionals.

He is currently the Treasurer and Director of Kalfam Enterprises, Inc., his clan’s real estate holding company as well as Corporate Secretary and Director of the market management firm VKD Holdings Inc., developer of the B.F. Ruins, the first micro-retail hub in southern Metro Manila.   In the field of securities, Atty. Kalaw is the Vice-President for Compliance and Regulatory Affairs of First Orient Securities, Inc., his family’s stock brokerage, and is a registered associated person (compliance officer) with the Phil. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) by the Project Management Institute of the United States since July 2011, he is one of only two Filipinos to be accredited as a Certified Business Counselor (with a practice focus on strategy coaching and business planning) for the APEC region by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat in Singapore.  He was also the Vice-President for Advocacies & Community Empowerment and subsequently Exec. Vice-President of the Philippine Internet Commerce Society, the industry association of e-commerce service and product providers in the Philippines, from 2005 to 2008.

Interdisciplinary Academic Qualifications and Experience

Atty. Kalaw received his Master of Laws (concentrations in corporate finance and electronic commerce) from Harvard Law School in 2001.  He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Management from the Ateneo de Manila University in 1993 and his Juris Doctor degree, with 2^nd Honors, from the same university in 1997.  He obtained his Master in Public Administration degree with the Dean’s Medal for a near-perfect grade average from the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines in 2010 and his Master of Business Administration degree with the joint Executive Master of Business Administration Program of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University of the United States and the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Business School in the People’s Republic of China in 2012.  In 2015, He obtained a Master of Studies in Sustainability Leadership at Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, with his dissertation as supervised by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership on “Integrating Sustainability Into Corporate Strategy and Governance in the Philippine Setting: A Comparative Study of Best Practices of Publicly-Listed Corporations Recognized for their Sustainability Leadership”.

He currently serves on the faculty of the Ateneo Law School, where he teaches Corporate Governance for the J.D. Program and Intellectual Property Management and Enforcement for the school’s pioneering LL.M. Program in intellectual property jointly sponsored by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines. He was the Philippine delegate to the 2011 Colloquium for Teachers of Intellectual Property jointly organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization and World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

Atty. Kalaw served on the faculty of the De La Salle University Graduate School of Business from 1999 to 2003, designing and delivering that graduate school’s popular elective on Corporate Legal Management, and was the country correspondent for the Philippines of the Asia Business Law Review from 2002 to 2003. He has also taught at the faculty of the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines from 2010 to 2012, where he designed and introduced that institution’s new graduate courses on the Philippine Judicial System and Negotiation & Dispute Resolution in the Public Sector.

Atty. Kalaw was submissions editor of the Harvard International Law Journal during Academic Year 2000-2001 and his own articles have been published in both local and international academic journals such as the Philippine Journal of Public Administration and the Asia Business Law Review.  He was a teaching fellow of the Program on Internet & Society of the Harvard Law School Berkman Center in Boston, U.S.A. [2001] and Singapore [2002]. He is a life member of both Phi Kappa Phi, the international interdisciplinary honor society, as well as Pi Gamma Mu, the international honor society for the social sciences.

Philippine Heritage & Public History

Atty. Kalaw was one of ten recipients of the 2010 Philippine Star Lifestyle Journalism Awards; his piece on his grandmother – former senator Eva Estrada Kalaw – being selected from over four thousand entries submitted to that newspaper. A former heritage columnist of the Philippine Star, his specialty column Cornerstone celebrated Filipino heritage in popular culture. He was the executive editor of the official centennial history of the Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of the Philippines, “One Hundred Years of Craftsmanship”, as well as its official coffee table directory of constituent lodges, “Philippine Blue Lodges: Heritage, Heraldry, & Heart”.  As a public historian, he represents the sector in the Board of Trustees of the Philippine Historical Association, the country’s union of professional historians. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

A prolific public speaker, Atty. Kalaw delivers between 30 to 40 keynotes and professional presentations a year. In Toastmasters International, the world’s largest civic organization dedicated to developing communications skills, he is the first and only Filipino to attain that organization’s highest achievement norm – Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) – in both the Traditional and Pathways Programs of Toastmasters International during the same leadership term (July 2019 to June 2020).

As an endurance racer, he has finished both the TBR Dream Marathon in 2014 and the Singapore Sundown Marathon in 2015.  He is married to the former Mariliza C. Villarosa, a published author and former Assistant Secretary successively at the Department of Budget & Management and Presidential Management Staff of the Philippine Government.  They are blessed with a daughter, Raphaella.