Family & Inheritance Law

We advise on marriage, divorce, custody, and succession, navigating Indonesia's pluralistic legal framework — civil law under the Marriage Law and the Compilation of Islamic Law, customary principles, and, for succession matters specifically, the distinct rules of testate and intestate inheritance that apply depending on the parties' religion and the applicable legal tradition — as the client's own circumstances require. A marriage solemnised under one legal tradition and a succession governed by another is not an unusual combination in Indonesia, and advising competently requires fluency in more than a single body of law.

In marital matters, we advise on the drafting and enforceability of prenuptial and postnuptial agreements, on the division of marital and separate property upon divorce, and on custody and guardianship arrangements, always with an awareness that these matters, however legally technical, are proceeding alongside some of the most difficult personal circumstances a client will face. In succession matters, we advise on the preparation of wills recognised under Indonesian law, on the administration of an estate once succession has opened, and on the resolution of disputes between heirs — disputes that, in our experience, are rarely only about the assets in question and are frequently about family relationships that the inheritance process has brought, often painfully, into the open.

Few areas of practice touch a client's life as directly as this one, and few demand a more careful balance between legal precision and personal discretion: the correct legal answer and the right way to deliver it to a client in the middle of a divorce or a bereavement are not always the same thing, and a lawyer who gets the law right but the delivery wrong has not actually served the client well. We bring both the precision and the discretion this practice demands, and we conduct it with the confidentiality that family matters, more than almost any other area of our work, require.