About

Marianne Malate-Guerrero has been senior vice president and head of legal at SM Investments Corporation (SMIC) for the last 10 years. She started her legal profession in private practice in 1989 at Castillo Laman Tan & Pantaleon where she specialised in corporate litigation for nine years. Malate-Guerrero was then hired by Solidbank Corporation as vice president, legal officer in1998 and worked alongside personnel from Citibank to organise the legal team. She was subsequently hired in 2000 by United Overseas Bank Philippines where she headed the legal department for five years. In 2006 she assumed her current position at SMIC, the parent company of the SM Group and the largest conglomerate in the Philippines. Its core businesses are retail, property and banking and the company is currently the market leader in all three core businesses. The listed company’s reach covers department stores, malls, hotels, commercial buildings and tourism which is why Malate-Guerrero has had to remain increasingly agile and abreast of emerging regulations in various industries. ‘My role is to make sure procedures are in place in respect of the legal risk. When I joined in 2006, SMIC had just finished its listing so I had to implement certain changes internally on providing legal services as we needed to monitor risk centrally from a group perspective. Unlike other companies we’re more collaborative as we have division heads that provide services and I’m there to coordinate and make sure that internal clients are both satisfied and compliant’. Malate-Guerrero sees this exposure to different kinds of practice as central to helping her understand better and perform more holistically as an in-house counsel. Her experience helped her notice an area that needed growth and change within SMIC. When she joined SMIC, Malate-Guerrero established a system to clearly delineate roles and areas of responsibility among various divisions in the legal department. The systems were also intended to improve the responsiveness of the legal team and ensure a more thorough handling of legal risk.