Team size: Six

Key team members: Lope Del Rosario Manuel, Jr. (Head of Legal for Philippines, Member of the Philippine Business Leadership Team), Enrique Carlos Vera (Senior AVP and Senior Counsel), Hera Lee Paner (Senior AVP and Senior Counsel), Benjamin Yan (Senior AVP and Senior Counsel for International Legal Employment Team), Carmel Liria-Alano (Assistant Vice President and Counsel), Ma. Angelica M. Liboon (Assistant Vice President and Counsel) 

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?  

Creating a globally integrated team. From a legal team of two lawyers, we created a fully functional Legal Team in the Philippines composed of six senior and seasoned counsels, with each member contributing best practices that are being used as benchmarks in the financial, banking, business process outsourcing and other related entities and are now being mirrored globally. We have a breadth of expertise and experience on our team, from long-tenured lawyers to newer legal professionals. This expansion brought forth a significant improvement in the way our Legal Team is structured and in the approach we follow in providing topnotch legal service to our local and global stakeholders. Today, we boast a business-centric and integrated approach to legal concerns in cooperation with our US counterparts to support contract negotiation, Firm policies, and overall risk assessment that is conscious to time-sensitive situations where prompt access to our subject-matter-experts legal team members are critical and necessary.  

Establishing a reputation as subject matter experts. We were able to swiftly and yet effectively establish a team of dedicated international subject matter experts in Corporate Law and Governance, Cross-Border Transactions, International Contracts, Labor Law, Financial Law, Technology and Privacy Laws. With regard to international legal transactions, fairly recently, we effectively transitioned back-office support legal work to US operations teams.   

Being at the forefront of developing a risk-conscious culture. Risk mitigation is in engrained to all aspects of our operations. Our lawyers are the front and center in developing a risk conscious culture, visibly and consistently supporting our business goals with a risk conscious approach. In the Philippines, our Legal Team has been consistently involved in creating comprehensive and easy-to-understand policies that address key compliance areas such as conduct, operations, confidentiality, and information security. These policies are accessible and relevant to all employees and are regularly updated to reflect the latest regulatory developments.  

Giving back to the community. Locally, our lawyers are highly respected experts in their fields and are known to extend relevant regulatory knowledge to other BPOs, business chambers, local universities and business groups by leading and conducting trainings and giving talks on Anti VAWC, Intellectual Property, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Laws, and Labour and Employment Best Practices in order to educate the community and the general public of their rights. 

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company? 

Absolutely. Even before the pandemic, we have always espoused for lawyers to have a seat at the right leadership fora. The pandemic has expedited the process of giving lawyers an important role in developing the strategic plans of the company. Today, we are not just legal advocates of Wells Fargo, we are business partners as well.  

Providing a client-centered legal service has become the center of our thinking. This goes beyond the legal deliverables that we are expected to provide; being client-centered means thinking how we can provide a legal service that is meaningful to our business operations. This is why our Legal Team has embraced data-backed, tech-enabled, multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving, value-creation, and customer-centricity of business. We do not just provide the best possible legal response but  we ensure to deliver efficient holistically considered, timely, actionable solutions to the enterprise’s areas of concern. 

The Legal Team of Wells Fargo in the Philippines now has lawyers attached to our global business units globally wherever those units are located, a big number of which are based in in the US. We built a solid foundation for our local team by seeking guidance from our global counterparts, amplifying the voice of our lawyers by creating visibility with our stakeholders, crafting solutions through collective wisdom, and embodying teamwork thorough an innovative approach on diverse legal issues. Understanding the value of geographic diversity, we assembled a legal team that mirrored the various backgrounds, roles, expertise, and interests of our stakeholders within our legal department. 

With the migration of processes online, several doors were opened for our team to be involved in both the long-term and short-term strategies of the company. Risk exposure and the concomitant risk appetite of the lines of businesses we support are key indicators of the success of any strategic endeavor, for which the legal team are always being asked to opine on. Given the growing number of regulatory and compliance policies coupled with the cross-border nature of several of our processes, there may be, at times, an inevitable tall order of our team’s involvement. This is why collaboration is the heartbeat of our team not just in the Philippines, but even more so with our colleagues in the global operations of Wells Fargo.  

Do you think the effects of AI on the legal world are overplayed or underplayed?  

AI has been helping our Legal Team to automate manual processes and work more efficiently, but as AI technology continues to evolve, legal professionals need to understand how to balance the benefits with the potential risks and ethical questions of AI in law and legal practice. AI’s effects are severely underplayed, in both its negative and positive effects in the legal world. Many of us would need to understand that just like how internet was a scary thing before year 2000, that is how AI (the Generative kind) is to us now. We have long been reaping the benefits of AI, from algorithms to simple automated replies – it has offered conveniences which our profession needs to fully leverage. On the other side of the spectrum, there is the negative impact on the environment.  

The more we rely on AI, the need to build energy-guzzling data centers increases, and these data centers have significant impacts on our environment. But our organisation is digitally mature, so we are fluid, innovative and data driven. So we are prepared to face this digital journey with an open mind. We recognise that this is an ongoing process, one of focused experimentation, adaptation, data analytics, process, cross-functional collaboration. We also recognise that AI is a tool, and just like any tool, it will be up to us to use it for the good.