Badayos & Badayos Law turns two

Badayos & Badayos Law, a law firm in Cebu City, opened on 14 September 2024 with two lawyers and one member of staff. It now has four lawyers, four in legal support, and three staff in one office. It acts in corporate, employment, family and estate, litigation, real estate, and special projects, for clients in the Philippines and abroad.

Maria Lourdes C. Badayos and Mark Lawrence C. Badayos founded the Firm and are its partners. She completed her Juris Doctor at the University of San Jose-Recoletos in 2018, and he completed his at the University of San Carlos the same year.

The Firm has two associates, Nicole G. Evangelista and Ivan Jed T. Rosal. Both earned their Juris Doctor at the University of San Carlos in 2023 and were admitted to the Philippine Bar in 2024. Nicole had worked in civil, tax, labor, and corporate matters in private practice, and in legislation and policy at the Cebu City Mayor’s Office. Ivan Jed had served as Court Decongestion Officer at Regional Trial Court Branch 77, and before that as a paralegal servicing a client in the United States.

By September 2026 the Firm was eleven people working from one office in Cebu City, acting in six areas of practice for clients in Cebu, elsewhere in the Philippines, and abroad.

The Firm has acted for outsourcing companies whose owners or parents are abroad, from registration through to the employment documents they run on. Where the owners are not Filipino the first question is whether the activity is open to them at all, which turns on the Foreign Investments Negative List and on how the investment arrives, not on the paperwork.

It has registered One Person Corporations and holding companies, kept stock and transfer books, filed General Information Sheets and the compliance calendar behind them, and acted as corporate secretary for companies that hold the function outside the business.

Its retainer clients include construction and property development companies, outsourcing companies, and food and beverage businesses. That work has no end date: the corporate housekeeping, the employment documents, the contracts as they come, and the questions that arrive before anyone has decided anything.

For employers it has written codes of conduct and employee handbooks the company can discipline under. One adopted from a parent company abroad usually cannot be. It has run disciplinary process, redundancy, and retrenchment, and appeared in dismissal disputes before the Department of Labor and Employment and the National Labor Relations Commission.

It has advised foreign buyers on what they may lawfully hold in the Philippines, and acted for owners and heirs on land that has sat in the family’s name for years and cannot now be transferred, on leases that cannot be annotated on the title because of the way they were signed, and on transfers stalled at an agency for a reason nobody has explained.

In family and estate matters it has acted in annulment and declaration of nullity, custody and support, adoption, recognition of a marriage ended abroad, and the settlement of estates, including the estate tax that has to be cleared before any registry will move a title to the heirs.

In litigation it has appeared for complainants and for the accused before the trial courts, the labor tribunals, and government agencies: in property and possession, in matters arising from what is published online, and in protection orders under the law on violence against women and their children.

Legal support is four people. Mel Joseph G. Castro completed his Juris Doctor at the University of San Carlos in 2026 and is an Underbar Associate. The three paralegals are law students: Franz Erika Arcamo is studying for hers at the University of San Carlos, and Rendel Alfonso Badayos and Antonie Rane Peralta are at Ateneo de Manila University. On 16 September 2026 Mel Joseph and Franz Erika received awards from the Foundation for Liberty and Prosperity, his for third place in its Dissertation Writing Contest and hers a place in its Legal Scholarship Program.

The Firm works from Unit 4G, Base Line HQ, Base Line Center, Juana Osmeña Street, Cebu City.