About
A firm built around public law and the courtroom
Natosmal & Bhatara Advocates is a law firm based in Jakarta, established by two founding partners — Erwin Natosmal Oemar and Bhatara Ibnu Reza — in 2025.
The firm
The firm exists because both partners kept meeting the same problem from different directions. One spent years researching why Indonesia's courts decide the way they do, and advocating for the reforms that would change it. The other spent years working on the law that governs the use of state force, from human rights monitoring in Jakarta to doctoral research on international humanitarian law in Sydney.
What they shared was a conviction that the hardest legal problems in Indonesia are not technical gaps in the code. They are questions about how public power is exercised, who is accountable for it, and whether the person on the other side of that power has anywhere to go. Those questions need counsel who can argue them properly.
We are deliberately a small firm. That is a choice about quality of attention, not a stage we intend to grow out of. It means the partners know every matter on the books, and it means we decline work we cannot do well.
What the firm is built on
Rigour
We treat legal research as the substance of the work, not preparation for it. Positions are tested against the strongest counter-argument before they reach a client, let alone a court.
Independence
Our advice is not shaped by whose interests are convenient. Both partners have spent their careers taking positions on the merits, and the firm operates the same way.
Accountability
Much of our practice concerns holding institutions to the standards they are bound by. We hold ourselves to the same expectation in how we handle a client's matter.
Access
Good representation should not depend entirely on ability to pay. The firm maintains capacity for public interest and pro bono matters alongside its commercial practice.
Our position in the market
We are not a full-service commercial firm and do not present ourselves as one. Clients come to us for a narrower thing: contested public law and criminal matters where the outcome depends on the quality of the legal argument.
Where a matter calls for expertise outside our practice — tax structuring, large-scale corporate transactions, specialist intellectual property — we say so early and work alongside firms we trust rather than stretching to cover it.