Teodoro Alejandro Y. Kalaw IV

Atty. Teodoro Kalaw IV 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. He has also been the first representative for the arbitration discipline of the Advisory Council of the Office of Alternative Dispute Resolution of the Republic of the Philippines from December 2020 to December 2023. In 2024, he served as the Project Consultant of the European Union’s initiative to review and redesign with the Philippine Government the Alternative Dispute Resolution Act of 2004.

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. 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 WESM. He chaired the arbitral tribunal that resolved the first two arbitrations of WESM in 2019. On 1 November 2021, he assumed office as the Dispute Resolution Administrator of the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) regulated by the Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission. 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. 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.

Atty. Kalaw is the Senior Partner and primary founder of the Kalaw Prasad & Hofilena Law Firm. 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, 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. 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 is the first Filipino to simultaneously attain advanced certification in both family business and family wealth advising from the Family Firm Institute, the world’s leading industry association on family business. In October 2022, Atty. Kalaw became the first Filipino to be elected a Fellow of the Family Firm Institute, the world’s leading learned society of family firm consultants, in both of that organization’s recognized discipline specializations: Family Firm Governance and Family Wealth Advising. 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.

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 2nd 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 as well as Governance, Law, & Development 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. 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.

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. 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. The first and most senior Filipino Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of the United Kingdom, he is also a Life 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 finished 3 marathons: the 2014 TBR Dream Marathon in 2014, the 2015 Singapore Sundown Marathon, and the virtual division of the 125th Boston Marathon in 2021.

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.