Team size: 17

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Two of the most significant cases that our legal team have recently been involved in are the merger between Tokopedia and Gojek, to become GoTo, and the subsequent listing of GoTo in IDX.

The GoTo merger represents the largest M&A transaction in Indonesia history (US16bn). GoTo is currently the largest tech powerhouse in Indonesia, and accounts for more than 2% of Indonesia’s GDP. GoTo is also the first platform to combine ecommerce Tokopedia — on-demand ride-hailing, food delivery, logistics; and Gojek payments and financial services.

The legal team on both side of the group executed the transaction within five months, an unprecedented achievement for a private transaction of this size. The combination required the legal team to negotiate an extraordinarily complex transaction documents, coordinate numerous world class investors and shareholders and coordinating numerous international and local legal counsel and tax advisors.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

Within the technology industry, speed, and execution in every aspect of the company is crucial, and this especially true when we are working on a transaction. Having an external counsel who understands the value-culture-nuances of the client is particularly important because they will essentially hold the pen in the transaction documents; there is substantial amount of reliance to the external counsel here, as we do not want to re-write documents. In my experience, perhaps it took an external counsel 2-3 times working on a transaction together before we can be in complete sync. I personally have selected external firms based on this criterion, because if you have external counsel who is already in alignment and know each other well, it will definitely affect the delivery timing and drafting style.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

Primarily, I believe that a key skill is business acumen. I always say the legal counsel role is evolving; at the beginning of one’s legal career, they will view everything from a purely legal perspective which may frustrate your stakeholders – but on the flipside this legalistic personality would also contribute to the personal development of the stakeholders. When a lawyer reaches middle management in legal, they have transformed into a legal person with business knowledge. In this stage they have found their working rhythm with the stakeholders and are able to give correct advice to the business and translating business needs into set of commercially induced legal documents. At the height of their career, they have now become a businessperson with legal knowledge. At this stage, they view deals and transactions strategically and give sound advice to management per their legal training, as well as seamlessly using data points and factual information to deliver work.