Both Counsel & Consul
How Audie de Castro helps the Filipino community
Published in 2024 San Diego Super Lawyers magazine
By Andrew Engelson on March 28, 2024
There are eight honorary consuls for the Philippine government scattered across the United States, and Audie de Castro is one of them. His duties range wide: from promoting tourism and authenticating documents to giving advice to those dealing with the U.S. justice system.
“Any Filipino citizen that needs assistance,” de Castro says. “Basically, I’m representing the Philippine government’s interests here, as well as the interests of the Filipino community.”
You could say de Castro was born to bridge this divide: His parents moved to the U.S. while his mother was still pregnant with him. A schoolteacher in the Philippines, she worked as a seamstress in America, while his father worked in the restaurant business—starting off bussing tables and moving up to manager.
Growing up with four other siblings, de Castro learned both English and Tagalog—a rarity among Filipino-American peers. “We kind of felt a little out of place,” he says. “Now that I’m older, I’m very grateful. I use the language almost every day.”
After graduating from the University of San Diego, de Castro worked as an accountant before getting his J.D. from the University of San Francisco in 1998. For a time, he did corporate transactions and M&A work but realized he had a knack for rainmaking. “The week after my son was born, I gave notice,” he says. His current practice focuses on corporate litigation, with an emphasis on securities, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and franchise disputes.
The honorary consul gig came to him in 2014. “The Philippine government contacted me through the Philippine Embassy,” he says. “They had been looking to appoint somebody and had been interviewing people. They’d heard about me and had been ‘observing’ me in the public setting.”
Since then, he’s helped citizens of the Philippines living in the greater San Diego area, as well as engaged with the Filipino-American community—all told, serving a population of more than 200,000.
To foster better connections, de Castro sometimes accompanies local officials to the Philippines. He’s met with ambassadors, dignitaries, even presidents. “I grew up in the hood—so to speak—and then, there I am with President Biden and President Marcos,” he says.
Much of the job entails helping people get appointments with embassies or attend Philippine Independence Day celebrations. But occasionally de Castro finds himself offering support and advice to those involved of serious crimes, including a Filipino man accused of murder. “I was the intermediary communication, because his family didn’t have much money and didn’t have a cellphone,” he says. “I would transport the messages back and forth. It was very old school.” The man later pled guilty.
Another complicated case involved a young Filipino man living in Arizona. Though de Castro despised what the man was accused of, he had some sympathy for the defendant: He was 19 years old, caught chatting online with people who were underage, was repentant and realized the seriousness of his mistake. “His father was a very kind man, very humble. Same with his mother. They were in tears in my office,” de Castro says. Eventually the man worked out a plea deal with prosecutors to serve several years in prison. “I wrote to him a few times to help keep his spirits up,” de Castro says.
The consul work is volunteer, de Castro says, though he’s occasionally reimbursed for legal expenses. One perk? It gives him an excuse to travel to the Philippines. Several years ago, de Castro took his oldest son. They visited an indigenous community and surfed the beaches of Luzon.
A standout moment for him was not much of a moment at all. It was an everyday thing. While staying in the Makati business district in Manila, de Castro went for lunch at a McDonald’s and enjoyed listening to the sounds of Tagalog in the background. “I just felt at home because I could hear everybody speaking my language while I was eating my hamburger and fries and reading my John Grisham book,” he says. Though his father died soon after de Castro was appointed, he did get to see a video of the ceremony. Watching it, de Castro says his father had “a really big smile on his face.” His mother was proud, too. “That being said,” he adds, “a few years after the appointment, she said to me, ‘It’s very hard to be your mother!’ All of her Filipino friends started asking questions about their Philippine issues and asking if she can get me to call them.”
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