Law firm cites growth as it celebrates 20th year
In recent times, there has a been a growing trend of firms here and abroad who tout themselves to be “lifestyle” law firms, where work-life-balance is of utmost priority and where the firm culture is only part of a lawyer’s life, and the lawyer is still able to maintain the core of his or her personality outside of work.
However, there is the school of thought that has been around since the dawn of the medium and large sized law firms in that the practice of the legal profession is also a business and for a business, of any kind, to survive where there is at least some competition, it needs to deliver reliable service and consistently competent work. Only those firms who consistently win survive and get more business. Moreover, as Harrison Barnes maintains in his article about lifestyle law firms: “Because the success of every law firm depends on everyone in it working hard and generating money, it is almost impossible to sustain a business by enforcing a certain “lifestyle” of not working hard. If there is no competition, the business may last; but it will never survive with competition in the market.”
The senior partners of OMLAW, Carlos Ocampo and Mannix Manalo both subscribe to the view that the practice of law requires a boundless resolve for any practitioner. Running a law firm and being part of one requires unfailing commitment. Echoing what Barnes said, the OMLAW partners agree that the law firms with the best reputations are most often those who work the hardest. “Attorneys who work the hardest generally win the most. Clients want people who are willing and able to fight for them – and not those who are running away from a fight.”
Now on its 20th year, OMLAW can rightfully claim as having achieved that rare and unique balance. The partners are unanimous in saying that whatever success that the firm has reached is mostly a product of their efforts in the last two decades. What is commonly shared by the partners is their conviction that there is no substitute for hard work and experience and it definitely was not because they stumbled upon some magical oil lamp in their 20-year journey.
It is not the biggest nor the most popular firm in the country by any means, but it is also not by any fluke of circumstance that it has attained a solid reputation to be a go-to firm of some of the biggest companies in the country and the world. A perusal of its client base will easily reveal that it has earned the trust and confidence of an A-list corporate clientele. In the local front, it counts among its clients, corporations such as Ayala Land, Ayala Resorts, Petron, CDO, ABS-CBN Mobile, PLDT, Phoenix Petroleum, Ever Bilena, MIASCOR, Columbia Motors (KIA), Skyjet, Asian Carmakers (BMW), AirSwift, among others. Among the multinational corporations that it handles, there’s H & M, Coca-Cola FEMSA, Snap On Tools, Kajima Corporation, Turkish Airlines, Air Asia, Hitachi Asia, Asahi Glass, Jeju Air, Xiamen Airlines, Hainan Air, Nippon Express, Air Seoul (Asiana Air) to name a few. They owe this growth not to some marketing gimmick but partly due to the fact that their clients themselves are their best marketers.
OMLAW is also proud of the fact that despite its relatively small size, it boasts of two homegrown partners in attorneys Jonby Valdez and Bernadeth Lim who were promoted into their roles around five years ago. The additional partners gave OMLAW the opportunity for more and continued growth.