About

One of Indonesia’s biggest online marketplaces, Tokopedia has come a long way since its founding in 2009. A significant part of the company’s success has been to down to the effort and skill of its legal department, which has been credited for supporting and facilitating Tokopedia’s initiatives whilst keeping it within the legal framework of a notoriously fast-moving industry. Vice president of the legal department Trisula Dewantara holds overall responsibility for a legal function that is brimming with some of Indonesia’s finest in-house legal talent. Now comprised of ‘12 young, energetic and professional lawyers full of creative ideas, innovation and insight’, the size of the team has doubled over the past two years and is structured to answer all business challenges faced by the company. Members of the legal team at Tokopedia were involved in major deals such as the raising of US$100m in investment from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Internet and Media Inc in 2014, when the company was the first technology company in Southeast Asia to receive such an amount. In 2017 they were involved in securing a US$1.1bn investment from Alibaba, the Chinese multinational conglomerate in another landmark agreement. Describing the effect of working in a fast-growing technology company, Dewantara says: ‘Our team needs to complete every business initiative under a tight deadline. In these settings, we always try to build close coordination and collaboration between team members to get the job done well. Further, having members with a deep understanding of the industry and its issues have always been crucial. Therefore, we always encourage the team to work closely with the business and technical teams from the first stage of business development to allow each team member understands the business end-to-end and speeding up the time to market cycle for every newly developed business’.