Could you share with us the story of your path to becoming an in-house counsel? What motivated you to choose this career path?

I would like to inform you that I had started my in-house counsel career as a long-term legal intern at Sabanci Holding for a year while I was studying at University of Marmara, Faculty of Law. Afterwards, I had worked at Taxia ,a tax consultancy company, as a legal intern for six months. Upon my graduation, I had started to work at Novartis as trainee lawyer starting from August 2021 and then, after I got my lawyer certificate, ı worked one more year as a legal counsel at Novartis until August 2023. Since then, I have been working as a legal counsel at Sandoz Turkey. My motivation becoming an in-house counsel is the followings; be part of a large and multinational pharma legal so that contribute as legal counsel to touch people’s life for the unmet medicines, supporting different business units of Sandoz Turkey to gain legal experience and to work on different contracts and business developments which I believe would contribute a lot my legal know-how. In addition to this, to develop my in-house professional legal skills I have enrolled Master of Law (LL.M.) Program at Marmara University, Faculty of Law for the Turkish Private Law. 

In your role as an in-house counsel, what are the main responsibilities and tasks you handle on a day-to-day basis?

My main responsibilities as in house counsel at Sandoz Turkey are the followings: 

• follow-up labor law and administrative lawsuits 
• to prepare legal notices 
• to give contract law advice, preparing contract drafts and reviewing of commercial agreements and to assist Business Development Team for required contracts with the supervision Legal Head 
• execution of transactions such as board of directors, general assembly and signature circular 
• to localise the global principles, templates and policies 
• to research and respond to daily needs of business units for data privacy and legal matters 
• to provide legal trainings for various matters in case of a need 
• to prepare and amend wholesaler contracts   
• to review promotional materials and congress sponsorship requests 
• to review projects with consultation of external counsel from competition law perspective. 
• to support Sandoz Grup (Sandoz Manufacturing Site) for all legal matters such as for labor law processes, participate disciplinary board meetings and to review toll manufacturing agreements.

What are some of the key challenges you have faced as a rising star in-house counsel, and how have you overcome them?  

I would like to first share my recent challenge of spin-off of Sandoz Turkey from Novartis Group to do so as legal department we have completed share transfers, separated contracts and signed TSA’s, LSA’s and MSA’s which took six months to complete during this transition I faced to work and manage to many different departments of Sandoz which we had successfully completed. This couldn’t be possible if we didn’t work as a team in every step of the spin-off.  In addition to this before my Sandoz role, I had also worked as an interim data privacy officer for both Sandoz and Novartis Turkey for 8 months.

This had been also challenging for me to follow up and guide both companies’ projects from data privacy perspective at the same time to make sure everything is compliant with the data privacy legislation. During this time, I was lucky enough to meet so many experienced colleagues in global data privacy team which had been always ready to support me when I needed. This had helped me a lot to overcome data privacy workload. The last challenge that I would like to mention was collective bargaining agreement processes for Sandoz and Novartis Turkey Manufacturing Sites, the consultation and negotiation phase took almost 5 months to reach out an agreement. During this period we had completed many long meetings, it was very challenging with high tension but we had managed to reach out an agreement in favor of our sites but in the meantime beneficial for all parties.