Indonesia’s IP lawyers are apt to be busy in the near future, if the country’s recent news headlines are any indication.

Last November, speaking at the G20 Summit in Nusa Dua, Indonesia President Joko Widodo said that an intellectual property waiver for health solutions, including diagnostics and therapeutics, “must be widened” for countries like Indonesia.

Widodo spoke before opening a session on health at the G20 meeting; he also said that the Covid-19 pandemic was a reminder that the world must stand ready for similar health threats in the future.

Health care and IP waivers, in this case, TRIPS-plus IP protections on medicines, came to fore again in May, at negotiations on an Indonesia-European Union Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in Brussels. Brook K. Baker, a law professor at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, in a column published in the Jakarta Post, noted that the 2016 textual proposal from the EU “contains multiple provisions that threaten access to affordable medicines in Indonesia and would impose intellectual property protections far in excess of those required under the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.”

Baker called for the EU to “withdraw all of its demands for TRIPS-plus IP protections on medicines” and for Indonesia to “hold steadfast in opposing measures that would needlessly interfere with its human rights duty to secure access to affordable medicines for its population.”

“Even after biopharmaceutical companies received massive infusions of public tax dollars to support research and development, clinical trials, and expanded manufacturing capacity, companies secured exclusive IP protections that safeguarded them against competition,” Baker wrote. “Thereafter, they preferentially supplied huge stockpiles of vaccines, tests, and medicines to high-income countries, sold at supra-competitive prices earning nearly US$90 billion in profits, and put low- and middle-income countries like Indonesia at the end of the line. Millions of lives were needlessly lost on account of this appalling pharmaceutical apartheid.”

Indonesia remains on the United States Trade Representative’s 2023 Special 301 Report, but also appeared in the “best practices” section of the document, specifically its expansion of its Intellectual Property Enforcement Task Force for coordinating IP enforcement and protection among several ministries of its government.

It is with this ongoing interest in IP laws we turned to IP professionals in the region in order to understand better what clients need today. Asia IP asked a large number of professionals – mostly in-house counsel and corporate legal managers – what they were looking for from their legal service providers. From their answers, we have compiled our list of Indonesia’s IP Experts, those lawyers who understand what their clients need and are able to provide them with the best practical advice.

To anyone familiar with the intellectual property market in Indonesia, it is no surprise that Rouse leads the list of law firms represented on the list; the powerhouse law firm placed six lawyers on our list, followed by AMR Partnership, Biro Oktroi Roosseno and SKC Law, each with three lawyers named to the list. A number of local, regional and global firms are represented by two lawyers each: Assegaf Hamzah & Partners, HHP Law Firm (the Indonesian branch of Baker McKenzie), Iman Sjahputra & Associates, Inter Patent Office, Januar Jahja & Partners, K&K Advocates, Lubis Santosa & Maramis, Makarim & Taira S., Pacific Patent Multiglobal and Tilleke & Gibbins.

Our survey includes only those lawyers working at law firms in Indonesia. Most of the lawyers named to our list have multiple practice specialties. Many of them are litigators, while others concentrate on prosecution work or provide strategic advice.

All of them have something in common: they are Asia IP’s IP Experts for Indonesia.

– Gregory Glass

Indonesia’s IP Experts is based solely on independent editorial research conducted by Asia IP. As part of this project, we turned to thousands of in-house counsel in Asia and around the world, and asked them to nominate private-practice lawyers, including foreign legal consultants, advisers and counsel.

The final list reflects the nominations received combined with the input of the editorial team at Asia IP, which has more than 45 years of collective experience in researching and understanding the legal market in Southeast Asia.

All private practice intellectual property lawyers working at law firms in Indonesia were eligible for inclusion in the nomination process; there were no fees or any other requirements for inclusion in the process.

The names of our 50 IP Experts are published here. Each IP Expert was given the opportunity to include their biography and contact details in print and on our website, for which a fee was charged.