About

Gamze Gökçen Pilevne, corporate secretary and general counsel, continues to lead the stellar legal team at Mercedes-Benz Türk consisting of 11 members including legal manager Sedat Tatar. The overall team runs the legal, compliance and external affairs functions with the external affairs team consisting of non-lawyers. Tatar leads the operation of the legal team and Merve Evrim, another key team member, is a specialist in distribution law and corporate topics. The team has grown substantially in the last two years with new members integrated well within the existing framework. It has helped the overall department handle changes in Turkish regulatory compliance matters in anti-trust, data protection, homologation and other automotive regulations. Pilevne highlights that the new motto of the team is to ‘shape the future, protect the company’ saying that, ‘the automotive industry is under enormous and rapid change in the age of digitalisation. There are still lack and grey areas with connectivity regulations, data privacy, e-commerce and autonomous driving regulation discussion has not even started yet in Turkey. Therefore, legal team must be one step ahead and must be working closely and intensively with business colleagues especially from IT and R&D’. The team is recognised for its ability to detect upcoming challenges and estimate the potential legal risks in new topics that are crucial in addition to ongoing routine legal issues. Pilevne adds that, ‘we believe as a legal team of Mercedes-Benz Türk that sustainable legal risk management of companies can be established only if business and management see and accept legal team as a real business partner within a transparent and trustworthy collaboration’.