Dante T. Pamintuan

Dante T. Pamintuan heads the Employment and Immigration Department of SyCip Salazar Hernandez & Gatmaitan. He specializes in labor and employment, litigation, and corporate services.

Mr. Pamintuan’s primary area of practice is in employment law, with 35 years of extensive experience in providing employers with practical and ethical approaches and solutions to all aspects of employment – from the selection and hiring of staff and members of management, through the gamut and cycle of personnel movements, and employer benefits, policy and practices setting. He advises clients and provides them with proactive approaches to all manner of employment issues that could attract litigation or collective action by individual employees or groups through compliance audits, investigation and disciplinary process assistance, and as a last resort, strategic handling of employment litigation and collective action. Mr. Pamintuan has successfully handled collective bargaining negotiations, strikes and lockouts, voluntary and compulsory arbitration, labor compliance audits, corporate restructuring and reorganization affecting staff and manpower, and other types of labor litigation. In addition to these practice areas, he also has substantial experience in mergers and acquisitions, employment-related tax and regulatory practice, and various types of litigation arising from these areas.

He was lead counsel in the Philippine mergers or acquisitions of several multinational pharmaceutical companies, as well as in other types of corporate reorganizations, including divestments and spin-offs. He has advised on the appropriate response to unionization drives in various multinational and multi-branch entities in the food and retail industry, pharmaceutical industry, and transportation. He advises and conducts training in grievance and disciplinary process handling for these firms, as well as for clients in the business process outsourcing industry. The most recent matters handled by Mr. Pamintuan involve employer response to changes in the rules governing outsourcing, data privacy, and competition in the Philippines.

Mr. Pamintuan also has substantial experience in corporate services work, and is active in litigation involving the Securities and Exchange Commission. He sits in the board of various companies and acts as resident agent or corporate secretary for some of them.

He is an accredited lecturer under the Supreme Court’s Mandatory Continuing Legal Education program, and conducts seminars and workshops for various clients on labor and industrial relations, labor standards, regulatory and ethics compliance, management for managers and supervisors, and related topics. He is a member of the People Management Association of the Philippines (PMAP) and principal representative of the Firm to the Employment Law Alliance.