Please join us in welcoming Bapak Gunawan Suryomurcito, who joins SKC Law as Partner on 1 September 2026!
Gunawan Suryomurcito’s Career in Indonesian IP
Bapak Gunawan began his career in intellectual property at Oei Tat Hway atents & Trade Marks. He spent nine years there, by the end of which he had taken charge of the firm’s trade mark anti-counterfeiting division. He went on to become a founding partner of Indopatent, and in March 1997 he established Suryomurcito & Co, later the Indonesian associate firm of the Rouse network.
His caseload across those decades has run to both contentious and non-contentious work. It has covered both trademarks and patents. Bapak Gunawan is a registered Advocate with the PERADI bar association. He holds a bachelor of laws from the University of Indonesia and a master of laws from Gadjah Mada University. He has also taken advanced intellectual property courses in Indonesia, Europe, and Japan.
He is ranked a Luminary by WTR 1000, a Notable Practitioner for 2026 by IP STARS, and an Elite Practitioner by asialaw. Asia IP named him to its Indonesia IP Experts list for 2025.
Contribution to Indonesia’s IP Framework
Bapak Gunawan’s involvement in Indonesian IP has not been confined to advising clients. In 1989 the first draft patent law reached Parliament, and he attended the public hearing as an invited expert. Parliament adopted one of his suggestions, and that statute gave Indonesia its first modern patent system. He is also a former President of the Indonesian Intellectual Property Society.
Teaching and the Wider Profession
Bapak Gunawan has been teaching in the intellectual property space for a long time. His 2005 paper on the principles of trademark law and unfair competition was delivered to a university- IP training programme, and Indonesian legal scholarship still cites it two decades later. He has also been a frequent speaker at IP seminars in Indonesia and abroad, providing IP training at the Criminal Investigation Education and Training Centre of the Indonesian National Police (POLRI), serving as a resource speaker at the Attorney General’s Office and Supreme Court training centres, and teaching in the IP Consultant Training Program.
He currently serves as Coordinator of the internal experts body of the Asosiasi Konsultan Kekayaan Intelektual Indonesia (AKHKI), the Indonesian IP consultants association, on its 2024–2028 board. That role exists to hold technical judgment for the profession and pass it on. SKC Law has long been active in the same association, including at AKHKI’s 2025 IP talk show.
Mentoring at SKC Law
Much of what a practitioner of Bapak Gunawan’s standing carries has never been written down. He knows how practices at the IP Office have shifted in a given period, and why. Some of it concerns enforcement. He knows which routes worked before the current regulations existed, and which quietly did not. Other parts are pattern recognition, such as spotting a bad-faith filing tactic in one sector and placing it alongside the same tactic in another sector a decade earlier. None of that sits in a database. It moves by apprenticeship, and it disappears when nobody is there to receive it.
Mentoring is therefore a substantial part of Bapak Gunawan’s remit at SKC Law, alongside his client work. He will be available to the firm’s associates and IP consultants across the prosecution, litigation, and enforcement teams. The benefit runs in the ordinary direction of good supervision: fewer avoidable strategy errors, faster judgment on marginal cases, and an accelerated career path for junior associates. It also runs the other way. A practice that files and enforces daily keeps a senior practitioner close to how the system behaves now.
We regard Bapak Gunawan as a practitioner whose judgment formed alongside the Indonesian IP system itself. That is not a capability a firm can build quickly.
What This Means for Clients
The practical effect for clients is depth on the questions that have no documented answer. Regulations describe what should happen. Long practice experience tells you what usually does.
Rights holders bring SKC Law contested prosecution histories, repeat infringers, and decisions that turn on agency behaviour rather than on the text of a rule. Bapak Gunawan is ideally placed to provide practical advice.
Welcome to SKC Law, Pak Gunawan!
For enquiries, contact us at enquiries@skclaw.id or follow us on LinkedIn for the latest updates.
