Team size: Seven

Key team members: Oliver Khaw, Siska Kasmara, Jon Warif Sitorus, Anindita Dhatrdewi, Sigit Sugiarto

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

While we handle a gamut of legal matters, both contentious and non-contentious, some issues that stand out for us are our dispute resolution cases and less than run-of-the-mill corporate exercises.

We have taken a highly challenging shareholders’ dispute and breach of contract claim to a very favourable conclusion this year, which involved a claim of damages against us over USD$750 million in 2012, tying up our Australian assets in a freezing order and multiple proceedings in Singapore, Australia and Indonesia. We have successfully defended ourselves and prevailed in the final appellate court in Singapore and the Western Australia Supreme Court. We worked with external counsels in multiple jurisdictions, coordinating strategies through the entire duration of the dispute, engaged numerous experts from around the world and dug through millions of physical and electronic documents.

We have assisted in our Company’s 1:10 stock split exercise, managing the entire legal process in-house from start to finish as part of the process to make our shares more affordable to the retail investors and successfully adding thousands of new individual shareholders after the conclusion of the stock split.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

Our legal team is committed to fostering a culture prioritising delivering practical and effective commercial solutions over convoluted legal jargon. Our role as legal advisors is not just to navigate the complexities of the law but to seamlessly integrate our legal expertise into the business landscape, enabling our organisation to thrive while mitigating risk. We do this through collaborative problem-solving with other departments instead of an ivory tower approach. We keep our communication simple as we strive to demystify complex legal concepts, translating them into actionable insights that facilitate informed decision-making across the organisation. Our recommendations are not based solely on legal considerations but also consider the practical implications and potential impact on business operations and potential legal risks to the organisation.

Does your team make use of interesting tech solutions to streamline its workload?

The team currently uses a virtual data room as a document repository and to help manage due diligence exercises remotely; the impetus for this was adjusting to pandemic conditions and encouraging less carbon emissions through reduced need for physical travel. We have also recently started utilising AI solutions in contract reviews. For initial use cases, it was mainly to streamline the review of our day-to-day contracts (specifically with run-of-the-mill NDAs, non-critical SLAs and standard coal sale contracts) and to pull out granular data quickly for management visibility/review. At a later stage, we intend to deploy an AI contract review solution to help review all types of agreements we handle to maximise its value. Having repetitive bread-and-butter contract review work automated allows the team to redeploy time and resources towards more value-added tasks. This essentially means moving up the value chain,  for instance through upskilling our “hard” and “soft” (which is something many in-house lawyers fall short on or take for granted due to working for only one “client”) skills.