Mr Ahmad Fikri Assegaf
Interviewer: Gabriela Eliana
Interviewee: Ahmad Fikri Assegaf (ALITA Board of Advisors, Co-Founder of HukumOnline and Justika, Co-Founder of Assegaf Hamzah & Partners)
Interview Date: 9 March 2022 via WhatsApp Voice Call
During the Indonesian reform era, Ahmad Fikri Assegaf co-founded HukumOnline, Indonesia's first one-stop legal portal that gives lawyers and non-lawyers convenient access to, among others, laws and regulations, legal clinic, and legal news. In this interview, he shares with ALITA his journey to enhance access to justice through the legal tech industry, and his takeaways on the rise of legal innovation in Indonesia and the APAC region.
Q1. What motivated you to launch HukumOnline? Could you please share with us what you intend to accomplish through HukumOnline?
HukumOnline was established approximately 20 years ago and the idea for it was born when I saw that Indonesian lawyers were having issues in accessing new regulations. Back then, we could only obtain new regulations by relying on weekly newsletters produced by a non-legal publication company and manually visiting governmental agencies.
While Indonesia’s first internet service provider arrived several years before the establishment of HukumOnline, the terms “legal technology” and “law and technology” were not frequently used together.
In my view, legal practice should not be a competition about who has access to regulations, but a competition about how law firms analyze problems and provide advice. Understanding the urgency to solve this issue, I discussed this matter with Arief Surowidjojo, my mentor when I was a part of Lubis Ganie Surowidjojo, Indonesia's current oldest and largest law firm. From the discussion, we agreed to initiate a joined library for regulations. However, there was still the issue of accessibility. Then, after networking with professionals from the tech industry, we figured out that to solve this issue of the accessibility, we could establish a web-based database.
I did not view HukumOnline as a business. The founders and I were, and remain, motivated by the goal to provide access to justice. Indeed, we first contemplated of establishing a foundation. However, upon consulting with several parties, including a funding agency, we were advised to establish a company instead, as it would allow HukumOnline to be more sustainable. Hence, we agreed to establish HukumOnline as a company, with the Asia Foundation as one of our earliest supporters.
Once HukumOnline was up and running, we encountered another issue, namely the lack of quality legal information. At that time, the lack of quality legal information was mainly because the mainstream media was not filled with people that have a good understanding of the law. A majority of them did not have a legal background. Thus, aside from creating a legal web-based database, HukumOnline provided legal news to counter this issue. As this initiative took place during the reform era, we recruited fresh law graduates – the front lines of change during the era – to achieve this goal.
My experience in the legal practice has shown me that access to legal representation is not accessible to many due to financial constraints. However, just like how there exists a “golden hour” within the fields of medicine, law practice also has a golden period, where accessing the right person with the right advice can save people from legal trouble. Therefore, after founding HukumOnline, I initiated Justika, where everyone can access lawyers to seek initial legal advice within seconds at an affordable cost, starting from as low as Rp. 30.000 (or equivalent to $2). As legal services are costly, Justika helps lawyers “unbundle” the cost of legal services to individual legal stages, providing cheaper services, especially in the provision of initial legal advice to approach cases.
Q2. In which direction do you think the regulatory and legal technology industry should be headed?
In Indonesia, numerous companies are still manually tracking their business-related license compliance. The main issue is that most of the time, the company's upper management is unaware of what is happening on the ground – whether or not they have complied with the existing rules and regulations within their jurisdictions. In my view, the next step is to further develop the regulatory compliance systems (RCS). Currently, HukumOnline provides RCS, where we utilize artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to ameliorate companies’ compliance checks.
Other than RCS, digital signatures must also be further developed. Digital signatures are nascent in Indonesia, and people have not utilized them maximally. Thus, the regulatory technology and legal technology industry must further develop digital signatures as they will undoubtedly be utilized more frequently in the future. Aside from that, blockchain-based solutions, mobile applications to register land and property, and machines to help the process of legal due diligence must also be further developed.
Q3. How mature do you think Indonesia’s and the APAC’s regulatory and legal technology industries are?
Regulatory and legal technology industries in Indonesia are still in their infancy. Hence, there are a number of innovations that can be explored. The development of regulatory and legal technology industries in Indonesia is undoubtedly affected by regulatory fragmentation. Unlike the medical industry where everything is tightly integrated, legal practice is not; laws and regulations are dispersed across different sectors. Furthermore, lawyers must provide solutions that are specific to the industries they serve as well as the segmented clients that they have.
In APAC, I don't see as many legal technology players as I do in the United States of America, where legal technology, as an industry, is prominent and sizeable. This becomes an opportunity for us to develop breakthroughs in the legal technology industry, especially as APAC is home to multiple unicorn start-ups that would significantly contribute to the growth of legal technology. However, in light of the preceding, I believe that the ultimate purpose of regulatory and legal technology should be about improving access to justice.
Q4. What are the most significant barriers to legal innovation with technology in Indonesia and the Asia-Pacific region, in your opinion?
There are no barriers that are only existent within the legal sector. While some may believe that companies and individuals’ resistance to change is a significant barrier, this obstacle should not be seen as such because it is also equally prevalent in other sectors; all sectors are challenging to alter. Legal innovation will be tremendously rewarding when one can make fundamental changes through legal innovation while also benefiting the society.
Q5. What advice would you give to lawyers and law students in preparation for the upcoming changes in the legal industry?
In approaching the intersection of law and technology, we must understand that technology is merely a catalyst in the process of providing and improving legal services. Thankfully, it does not replace lawyers. As a result, when one is training to become a lawyer, do strive to be a lawyer who studies and truly understands the laws, rather than only understanding the method of delivering legal services. Every legal scholar should not only grasp the procedure of applying the laws, such as how to file cases to the court and how to form corporations, but they must also be able to investigate and answer the most fundamental legal questions.
Furthermore, everyone in the legal profession must become more than just a recipient of change but also an agent of change. Innovations can be discovered in the most common problems we face. In HukumOnline, we noticed innumerable challenges in the legal field, yet we only have as many human resources. Therefore, do not only sit back and wait for things to change once you have identified the problems you can rectify.
Interviewee’s Profile
Ahmad Fikri Assegaf is one of the Founders of HukumOnline, the first Indonesian legal portal which gathers legal information, references, and news in one platform. He is also the Co-Founder of a top-tier law firm in Indonesia, Assegaf Hamzah & Partners, which is a member of the Rajah & Tann Asia network. He has more than 25 years of experience in a wide range of legal practice, including capital markets, banking & finance, projects, mergers & acquisitions, project finance, and Shariah finance. His clients include venture capital and private equity investors looking to access the Indonesian market, as well as targets, especially start-ups. He has served as an outside general counsel and commissioner, assisting managements, board of directors, and investors in creating and executing business strategies, as well as providing legal advices ranging from day-to-day corporate and regulatory matters to high-stake strategic matters.