Team size: 19

Key team members: Trisula Dewantara, Donny Fadilah, Pricilla Halim, Julio Nanda Valentino Panjaitan

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

After the merger with Gojek and the formation of the GoTo group, the legal team actively participated in the efforts to maximise synergy within the group and in the integration of business units to form an effective organisation structure.

We advised the business team on the launch of cross-pollination initiatives between Tokopedia, Gojek and GTF as part of the effort in building a super-ecosystem digital platform that combine e-commerce, on-demand services, financial services and other digital services as well as to drive user growth and engagement via cross-pollination and increasing usage amongst consumers, merchants, and driver-partners.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

One of the litigation and IP team’s tasks is examining and verifying reports of IP infringement allegations submitted by brand owners. Previously, the Litigation and IP team managed tens of thousands of monthly reports and conducted examination or verification manually.

By the end of 2022, a report system was developed, and it has successfully reduced the need for legal work and working time by almost 80%. This establishment and development have been done by internal teams. Thus, Tokopedia did not deal with a large expense.

Can you sum up the team culture or ethos?

The team has always been provided with a supportive work environment that offers open communication and honest feedback amongst the team members, which we embrace as one of the best ways to elicit peak performance. To increase team productivity and satisfaction, everyone is trusted and given room for freedom and responsibility in making decisions. As leaders, we need to give them context and information in support of their decision.

Consequently, employees can make a good decision and the leaders can capitalise on their creativity to improve best practices. The team has also been taught that as a lawyer, they must have a growth mindset to help the business team find legally acceptable solutions instead of being overly risk averse.

Room for error is allowed because we believe that it is possible that while one makes mistakes throughout the process, it serves as an opportunity for the team to learn and make better choices.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

The team works with other stakeholders in the organisation, particularly on the annual sustainability report to provide data, clarity and credibility to everything the organisation does to fulfil its mission; we take part in, setting up numerous company’s policies and guidelines; protecting the company’s intellectual property, including registration of very first company’s patent along with the tech and engineering teams; and we are proactive members of the Brand Alliances Program which strengthens the company’s effort to fight IP infringement globally and assist the effort in securing certification related to privacy information management (ISO 27701) and information security (ISO 27001).

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

As one of the rapidly growing technology companies in Indonesia, Tokopedia relies on the legal team and contracts to onboard new business partners and vendors. As such, contracts determined our speed of growth. We dealt with thousands of new contracts monthly and were not equipped to onboard.

Hence, we adopted a contract automation system that could give the legal team the control and visibility it needed to ensure compliance and accelerate execution. With this in place, the team decreased contract turnaround time for certain types of agreement processing from three business days to a single day.

The system continues to support thousands of contracts annually with full visibility into each. Ease of use has led to enterprise-wide user adoption, turning legal from a manual contracting department to system supervisor – allowing the team to focus on essential and meaningful tasks rather than overseeing every step of the contracting process