VeraLaw managing partner Valeriano Rosario has reflected on the firm’s success in the wake of celebrating its 75th anniversary, highlighting the specialist teamwork approach to tackling challenges.
The firm’s staff, lawyers and clients celebrated the 75th anniversary at the Manila Polo Club in Makati on 26 November 2024.
Rosario, who focuses on maritime and admiralty law, told Asia Business Law Journal that, to him, the most impactful and difficult undertaking of his firm was the Dona Paz case.
“It was unthinkable that a tragedy that occurred in the Philippines would be litigated in the United States, and succeed,” Rosario said.
VeraLaw, founded in 1949 and currently counts four partners with 12 associates, was 38 years into its operation when a Philippine-registered passenger ferry, the Dona Paz, collided with an oil tanker, Vector, in Philippine waters in 1987, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths and 26 survivors.
Rosario, whose firm represented more than 3,000 families who lost loved ones on Dona Paz, worked on the legal team that succeeded in securing a settlement from a US oil major, which owned the cargo on the Vector.
The firm was committed to the case for 30 years and eventually ended in 2017 following a global settlement of all litigation proceedings in several US and Philippine cities through the class action procedure in New Orleans, with 3,276 Filipino families having received their settlement cheques from the US oil major, which cannot be named due to a confidentiality agreement.
“During the final year, VeraLaw deployed three lawyers and three paralegals in those three cities [Houston in Texas and the Philippine cities of Manila and Catbalogan] to organise an orderly system for the distribution of the settlement cheques. Seeing the families collect their cheques was one of the happiest days in my life,” Rosario said.
Overall, the success of the firm, Rosario told Asia Business Law Journal, hinged on it being a specialist rather than a generalist with partners focusing on different areas of legal practice, including dispute resolution, labour law, intellectual property and maritime law, for example.
“We have continued by helping young lawyers mature into lawyers with subject matter expertise and by doing so VeraLaw will hopefully thrive for years to come,” he said.
To achieve growth going forward, Rosario pointed to the need for his firm to retain its core of knowledgeable and specialised lawyers who are known to clients.
“The generation who are specialists now, need to be unselfish to train and share their knowledge with a new generation, who hopefully become the next generation of specialist lawyers,” he added.
