IN MANY WAYS, Cayetano the private practitioner was not what people like to call an abogado de campanilla, although he styled himself as one and commanded high fees like other corporate lawyers who made company boardrooms and courts their second homes. Colleagues say Cayetano was more like an abogado de kape, given the hours he spent in hotel lobbies and restaurants, chatting with clients and influential friends over cups and cups of coffee.

Not that there was anything wrong with that; many law firms usually have at least one lawyer who does much of the office PR, which may call for massaging the egos of prospective or current clients or sweet-talking certain individuals who may help win a case. But while some lawyers may resist devoting much of their time in such tasks, Cayetano apparently didn’t. More precisely, says a former co-worker, he enjoyed it.

Thus, at the powerful Angara Abello Concepcion Regala & Cruz Law Offices (ACCRA), where he rose to become senior partner in the late 1970s, Cayetano did little litigation and was not even known for his work in labor law, his supposed field of expertise. What occupied much of his time there, was “going around with big shots” such as then Makati Mayor Nemesio Yabut and Fiscal B. Jose Castillo of Rizal, partly because the partners thought he would be of most use to the firm doing that. Later, the partners also assigned him to liase with the firm’s “special friend,” then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile.

It was Enrile who brought Cayetano his first taste of being in the media spotlight, via the Pepsi Paloma rape case in 1982. The teenage starlet, who said she had been raped by three hosts of a popular noontime TV show, had approached the defense minister for help. Enrile decided to refer the matter to ACCRA, and contacted Cayetano.

“Ang sabi sa ‘kin, ‘Rene, I’m sending Pepsi over to you,’” recalls Cayetano in an interview. “Kako, ‘I don’t drink Pepsi, I drink Coke.’”

“Seryoso ako,” he says. “I didn’t know who she was.”

The case is often among those cited by Cayetano whenever he is queried about his trial work. According to a lawyer who was privy to the case, though, Cayetano never got to be directly involved in litigating it. He had little trial experience, says the lawyer. “It was the litigation group that made the assignment of lawyers, and he was not assigned to handle the trial. His role was to handle the media because ACCRA trial lawyers don’t like being interviewed.”

To be sure, it was not as if Cayetano was not academically prepared for the work demanded by ACCRA of most of its lawyers. A University of the Philippines law school graduate (Class of ’59), he had gone on to the University of Michigan to earn two master’s degrees—one in public administration and the other in law (with a thesis in collective bargaining)—as well as a doctorate in law. But many of those who know him personally agree that much of his talents lie not in the courtroom but in relating to people.

“Marunong kasi siyang pumulso, humanap ng kiliti (He knows how to relate to people, what makes them tick),” concedes Jesus Manalastas, a colleague at ACCRA who is now a senior partner at the Ponce Enrile Reyes & Manalastas (PECABAR) law offices that Cayetano helped found in 1983. “He’s a born politician, he really likes dealing with people.”

But at PECABAR, says Manalastas, Cayetano took on more management responsibilities and became more active in assisting corporate clients during collective bargaining agreement negotiations. Senior partner Edwin Gastenes, who was also Cayetano’s campaign manager in the May elections, adds: “Contrary to some observations that he does not do legal work, Rene sets the tone and contributes his own theories. He’s there in the thick of the fight. Rene handled most of the foreign banks that retained us, and dealt with their unions.”

Yet both admit that “social skills” remained a serious matter for Cayetano, who considered these essential in getting and keeping clients. He encouraged PECABAR lawyers to loosen up, at one point even setting aside Friday afternoons for ballroom dancing. The lawyers were also urged to take up sports, especially golf.

Cayetano at least was one who took his own advice—and it ended up serving him very well. It was at the Alabang Country Club golf greens, for example, that he often bumped into then President Fidel V. Ramos, who later offered him the post of presidential legal counsel in 1996. It was also in between putts at the club course that he and ABS-CBN bigwig Freddie Garcia first agreed to put “Compañero y Compañera” on radio.

He was already anchoring a radio program at a client-owned station by then. In the program, he and other PECABAR lawyers took queries on legal matters from phone callers. But the station had a very weak signal; although based in Makati, just a few floors above the PECABAR offices at Salcedo Village, its broadcast could not even reach Alabang.

While Cayetano says he was overwhelmed by the response the show was getting, his absences from it soon got more frequent. He now says that he was simply growing tired of the program, which he was doing without pay. Yet he would later adopt some of its features on his DZMM show, which took the 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. timeslot.

The format of “Compañero y Compañera,” which he also did for free, was simple: On Mondays, callers could phone in their questions, which would be answered live by Cayetano. Santos-Relos would try to translate any legalese into layman’s terms, and provide follow-up questions that a non-lawyer would probably want to ask. From Tuesday to Friday, Santos-Relos would read a letter or two, and Cayetano would give his legal opinion on them. It was only on Mondays that Cayetano would be at the station and giving advice off the top of his head. The letters Santos-Relos read the rest of the week were pre-selected. Copies were given to Cayetano, who would then turn them over to PECABAR lawyers to study. By broadcast time, Cayetano would be armed with copies of the letters and the lawyers’ research—and bantering with his co-host by remote from his office, the gym or yet another hotel lobby.

Admittedly, the set-up was not very innovative. But with many Filipinos having no access at all to lawyers and yet were wondering just where they stood legally in a gamut of situations, it worked just fine. As for giving Rene Cayetano, esquire, a public voice matched by a flattering public image, it worked even better.