Rafael Morales was recently elected to the position of Managing Partner of SyCip Salazar Hernandez & Gatmaitan, succeeding Llewellyn L. Llanillo, who retired as a partner of the law firm in August 2009.

Morales joined SyCip Law in 1975 and headed the firm’s Banking, Finance and Securities practice group until his election to the top post.

Among the country's leading lawyers in the field of banking and finance, Morales has long been a fixture in international and regional reviews of corporate and commercial law practitioners. A professorial lecturer at the University of the Philippines College of Law, he has written several books and articles on Philippine banking and securities law. Last year, he served as president of the Inter-Pacific Bar Association, an international organization spanning 67 national jurisdictions and composed of more than 1,650 business and commercial lawyers who live, or have a strong interest in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Morales graduated cum laude both when he obtained his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws degrees from the University of the Philippines. He was also valedictorian of his law school class and placed fourth in the 1974 bar examinations. He holds a master of laws degree from the University of Michigan (where he was a DeWitt fellow) and served brief legal stints abroad as a foreign attorney with Rosenman Colin Freund Lewis & Cohen in New York (1978-1979), and later at Anderson Mori & Rabinowitz in Tokyo (1984-1986). In 2007, Morales was a Visiting Professor at the School of Law of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

SyCip Law places a premium on integrity and excellence, and its partners are the epitome of this standard. Effective January 2010, Marianne Miguel was admitted as the newest partner of the firm.

Miguel graduated with honors from the Ateneo Law School and joined SyCip Law in 2000. The firm’s newest associates also include two of the top 10 placers in the 2009 bar exams – Joan Mae To and Sheila Abigail Go – who placed seventh and 10th, respectively. Both graduated with honors from the Ateneo Law School, and were invited to join SyCip Law after undergoing a stringent recruitment process.