Litigation & Dispute Resolution

Litigation is the discipline from which every other practice at KHAI & Partners takes its standard, and it remains the truest test of a firm's competence: a contract opinion can be hedged, a compliance memorandum can be qualified, but a pleading filed in court either withstands scrutiny or it does not. We represent clients before courts of general jurisdiction at every level — district courts, the High Court and where a matter's importance or its legal novelty warrants it, the Supreme Court on cassation and judicial review. We conduct this work under the procedural law that governs Indonesian civil process — the colonial-era Herzien Inlandsch Reglement and Rechtsreglement voor de Buitengewesten, as supplemented by successive Supreme Court regulations — a framework that rewards procedural precision as much as substantive argument, and punishes carelessness in either.

Our disputes practice does not begin at the courthouse door. Before a single pleading is drafted, we conduct the factual and evidentiary assessment that determines whether litigation is in fact the client's best available course, or whether the client's actual objective is better served by negotiation, mediation, or arbitration under the rules of the Indonesian National Board of Arbitration (BANI) or another institution the parties have agreed to. Where litigation is the right course, we build the case from the evidence outward rather than from the desired outcome backward: witness statements, documentary evidence, and expert opinion are tested for how they will read to a judge who has never met the client and has no reason to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

Where settlement is the right course, we negotiate as advocates, not as intermediaries indifferent to outcome — our obligation runs to the client's interest, and a settlement we recommend is one we are satisfied serves that interest on its merits, not merely one that closes the file. Mediation and amicable resolution, increasingly favoured by Indonesian courts at the pre-trial stage under Perma 1/2016, are pursued with the same preparation we would bring to trial, because a mediator unpersuaded by the strength of a party's position produces a weaker settlement than one who is.

We draft every category of litigation document the practice requires — Statements of Claim, Statements of Defence, Replies, Rejoinders, interlocutory applications, Appeal Briefs, and Cassation and Judicial Review submissions to the Supreme Court — and we develop litigation strategy with an eye not only to the immediate judgment but to its enforceability, its appellate exposure, and its consequences for the client's broader affairs. A judgment that cannot be executed is not, in any meaningful sense, a victory; we plan for enforcement from the outset, not as an afterthought once judgment is obtained.