AFTER entering the day’s news cycle and relishing the spotlight, what happens next to a Bar exam topnotcher?
Once Arlene Maneja achieved in 2002 what Diosdado Macapagal last did in 1936, she opened the doors for more Thomasian lawyers to enter the world of judiciary.
“At the time I topped the Bar, big law firms don’t usually hire from UST,” she told the Varsitarian in an email interview, adding, “so the most immediate impact of my achievement was to open these previously closed doors for me and the Thomasian graduates after me.”
Maneja ended UST’s 66-year drought to become the fifth Thomasian to ace the Bar. In achieving the landmark feat, she reviewed for only two months.
How come? When the Varsitarian first interviewed her after the results came out in 2003, Maneja said that in the first months of the Bar review, she turned lax after being confident in reviewing cases and legal concepts for most of her law school days. She took a vacation.
“Minsan, nag-sorry ako sa Kaniya kasi ang kapal ng mukha ko,” she said at the time. “Hinihingi ko na tulungan Niya akong mag-top sa Bar pero I know that my preparations were nothing compared to what I should be doing.”
Maneja would always imagine at night the euphoria of being No. 1 at the Bar, seeing herself in the national dailies and earning the right to a special Varsitarian supplement. “[They tell me] always to be careful in what I wish for because I might just get it,” she said in the 2003 interview.
Just cause
Mae Diane Azores had lower expectations. “I only prayed to place number eight,” she told the Varsitarian in an email interview.
Azores was a financial analyst at the Commission on Audit when she aced the Bar in 2019, and a product of the College of Law of UST-Legazpi. The daughter of a jeepney driver pursued law after her friend was raped and killed in 2011 in Daraga, Albay – a case that remains unresolved to this day.
Her achievement paved the way to promote her advocacies for gender equality and worker’s rights.
“I was invited to join a human rights lawyers’ organization, which allowed me to handle public interest cases,” she said. “I learned a lot from the brilliant human rights lawyers I worked with and from the ordeals of our clients.”
One ordeal close to her heart is the jeepney modernization program, which prohibits non-consolidated drivers from plying their routes. The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers-National Capital Region Chapter, of which Azores is part, served as co-counsel for a petition by transport groups asking the Supreme Court to pause the revocation of the franchises of non-consolidated jeepneys.
“Anak ako ng isang jeepney driver at isang malaking karangalan na maging isa sa mga abogado na naglalayong maprotektahan ang kabuhayan at karapatan ng mga jeepney driver at commuter,” she said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Dec. 20, 2023.
High-stakes legal battles cause Azores to stress out, but she is satisfied in rendering service to her clients no matter the cost.
“Mistakes must be avoided as much as possible because the life, limb, and property of another is in my hands,” she stressed. “It was stressful and taxing, but it was also a lot more rewarding. The grateful faces of my clients after I have helped them gave me so much more fulfillment than any medal or award could ever give.”
Low profile
Maneja retreated from the spotlight but flaunted her capacity in the legal world.
As a partner at the SyCip Salazar Hernandez and Gatmaitan law firm, she has been involved in various acquisitions and biddings for leading Philippine businesses, including Meralco, PLDT and Century Pacific Group, according to the firm’s website.
What she encountered instead was near-failure when she took an entrance exam at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) to take up a master’s in business administration (MBA).
“I had really dismal math scores,” the 2002 topnotcher recounted. “However, considering that diversity of thought is important in MBA classes and AIM does not see many lawyers applying to business school, then Dean (Ricardo) Lim took a chance on me given my high IQ and English scores and the fact that I was a Bar topnotcher.”
“[Dean Lim] thought that the intelligence and perseverance that would have been necessary to achieve such feat would help me survive and thrive in business school.”
Fighting stereotypes
Azores often felt like “walking at a tightrope” in the legal profession simply because of sex.
“In my experience, if I am being assertive or too strong, I would often receive comments that I am not ‘behaving like a woman’ or that I have to ‘tone it down,’” she said. “People also tend to give unsolicited comments about my personal life, mostly on how becoming a lawyer will prevent me from finding a romantic partner because men will be intimidated or that I am ‘too career-oriented.’”
The Albay-based topnotcher got a taste of online bashing just months after the Bar results came out in 2020. She described the state of the nation as “its worst in years” just hours before former president Rodrigo Duterte delivered his fifth State of the Nation Address. “Hearing false promises and empty rhetoric have become the ‘new normal.’ Nakakapagod na, tama na,” she posted on July 27, 2020.
After commenters taunted her to run for the presidency instead, Azores hit back.
“Sa lahat po ng nagsasabi sa akin na ’’Eh ’di tumakbo ka kayang presidente?’ did you know that Section 2, Article VII of the Constitution requires that the president must at least be 40 years old?” she said. Judd Ericka Marie F. Crescini with reports from Faith Nicole S. Gelacio
