rancisco Santillán Almeida , Founding Partner

Mr. Santillán earned a Doctorate in Jurisprudence from the Catholic University of Ecuador and he is a practicing Attorney in the Courts of the Republic of Ecuador. He also has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Legal and Social Sciences.

In addition to his legal studies, Mr. Santillán completed an Executive Management Program at the Central American Institute of Business Administration (INCAE) and he participated in Harvard’s Theory and Tools for Negotiation Project (Conflict Management, Inc.) in Cambridge. He also obtained a postgraduate degree in Tax Law (Specialist) from Simon Bolivar Andean University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Management and Commercialization from San Francisco de Quito University. He has taken courses in Business Trusts, Legal Information Technology, and Electronic Commerce at Menéndez Pelayo International University and the University of Zaragoza. He also studied English as a Second Language at Pace University in New York. He has participated in diverse seminars about financial/banking law, business trusts and titling, information and communication technologies, negotiation and alternatives for conflict resolutions, and English as a second language in Panama, Spain, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States.

Currently Mr. Santillán is an Arbitrator at the Arbitration Tribunal of the Chamber of Commerce of Quito, the Arbitration Tribunal of the Chamber of Construction, and the International Tribunal of Arbitration, Mediation, and Conciliation (e-iure) in Madrid. He is also a member of the Iberian American Federation of Lawyers (FIA), the Iberian American Association of Law and Information Technology (FIADI), and the College of Lawyers of Pichincha (CAP). Furthermore, he is a Professor at the postgraduate Management Program of San Francisco University of Quito and the undergraduate School of Law of the University of the Americas (UDLA). He has published a thesis titled América Latina: Subdesarrollo, Dependencia y Transformación Política (Latin America: Underdevelopment, Dependence and Political Transformation). He speaks Spanish and English.