Aktay Law Firm

Aktay Law Firm is a full-service law firm established in Istanbul, providing legal consulting to domestic and international clients by successfully blending business insight with legal expertise. The firm is recognized by leading international law firms around the world, actively contribute legal articles to international publishers, and participate in the seminars and panels in its areas of expertise.

The firm is led by Faruk Aktay, LLM, who is a stellar lawyer licensed to practice law in Istanbul, London, and New York. During his career, he has been involved in domestic and cross-border M&A, project finance, and capital markets transactions, provided legal advice in various corporate and commercial matters and represented individual clients in a wide range of personal matters. His education in law and economics at graduate level and understanding of different legal regimes allows him to bring unparalleled insight and novel perspective to complicated legal matters. His commitment to excellence and dedication to deliver the best will assure you of receiving sound, tailor-made legal solutions meeting the highest professional standards.

Practice areas: The firm provides legal services in a wide range of practice areas. In every legal transaction, the team works carefully to recognize client’s objectives, iron out the best possible legal structures, and help them establish and maintain positive and productive relationships with business partners and counterparts. The firm also represents clients in a broad range of commercial disputes as well as personal matters.

Commercial and business: We provide legal assistance to our clients in a wide range of commercial contracts and business arrangements. We carefully understand your commercial interests and goals in a deal and work closely with you while drafting, commenting on, and negotiating commercial contracts. 

Our business-savvy lawyers are highly experienced in dealing with all types of agreements for domestic and international purposes. Our reasoned and calculated approach will allow you to establish and maintain positive and productive relationships with your business partners and counterparts. 

Our areas of expertise include preparing standard terms of business, international trade and sale-purchase agreements, agency, distribution, franchise agreements, all sorts of procurement, and outsourcing arrangements.

Corporate and M&A: The firm offers tailor-made transactional advisory services in relation to mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, partnerships and strategic alliances, private equity, and venture capital investments. 

The firm advised foreign and Turkish clients on national and cross-border mergers acquisitions, public and private takeovers, leveraged buy-outs and asset transfers.  While drafting of share purchase agreements (SPAs) and shareholder agreements (SHAs), we harmonize special contractual provisions with Turkish law specific requirements. 

Especially in regulated industries, where complex legal rules and regulations may be raised as legal obstacles, our negotiations with regulatory bodies and government officers always stand out as a difference-maker.

Banking and finance: Our general banking practice includes regular banking advice, particularly assisting our clients in negotiating term sheets, drafting and negotiating facility and security agreements, providing legal opinions in relation to financing arrangements.

In the field of project finance, we offer comprehensive legal advice to borrowers and local and international banks and financial institutions in relation to project finance transactions on a non-recourse or limited recourse basis.

We are experienced in broad range of industries including energy, mining, transport, infrastructure, manufacturing, and services.

We have advised our clients in various build operate transfer (BOTs) and public/private partnerships (PPPs) projects and provided legal advice in relation to the EPC, O&M, and several other types of procurement and outsourcing contracts.

Intellectual property: Our firm is committed to providing the best quality of service in the field of trademarks, designs, patents, copyrights, trade secrets and domain names. We represent our clients in national and/or international registration and opposition proceedings, before the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office and WIPO.

We provide consultancy to domestic and international companies in the textile, cosmetics, fashion, media, automotive, automotive, pharmaceuticals, food, software, electronics, especially e-commerce sectors on the protection and management of their intellectual property portfolios and supports them in the acquisition of intellectual property to expand these portfolios. We have experience in assisting IP infringement, unfair competition, invalidation, and cancellation of intellectual property rights. We assist clients in the handling of investigations, raids and seizures, and customs proceedings.

Litigation and dispute resolution: Our philosophy is always to explore what is right for you and start with a thorough analysis of the matter in hand. Where possible we do our best to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation processes and find a way to cooperate with the other party and benefit from the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms.

Where the opponent is hostile, we carefully design a road map with our clients, highlight the weaknesses and strengths of the dispute, where necessary we take all precautionary measures like preliminary injunctions and always prepare state-of-art court papers. During the trial process, our clients always feel the ease of working with the firm’s exceptional lawyers.

Competition and regulation: Competition and regulation is a highly dynamic field and the applicable rules and legal and economic reasoning behind the decisions of government authorities are in constant change.

The team has a solid grasp of regulatory rules in a broad range of regulated sectors including banking, energy, mining, transport, manufacturing, and services. Thanks to our deep-diving knowledge in the field and thorough understanding of the economic and legal explanations, we will come up with the most creative and convincing arguments for the highly important merger and acquisitions notifications, exemption filings, and investigations launched under Article 4 and 6 of the Competition Law.

To best assist clients, our competition and regulation team draws on the resources of world leading law firms and economic consulting firms, actively participates in international conferences, and regularly publishes scholarly articles, news, and updates about the developments in Turkey.