About

A lawyer with over 15 years’ experience in reputable national and multinational companies, Özgür Ozan Döker brings a large amount of multidimensional experience to Sofra Grup, a leading Turkish food and support services provider. Prior to his current role, Döker served as an in-house lawyer for Total Oil Turkiye over a period of four years, cultivating his knowledge in petroleum and LPG market law, as well as contract management and compliance. Döker started his career with his own law firm, Döker & Ilgin law office, with a partner, and worked there for three and a half years. This gave him valuable litigation and practice experience which he is still using in his daily business. After that, his in-house career at multinational company ILCE Taşımacılık began, and now after 15 years in-house he is still on what he describes as an ‘exciting journey’ as a general counsel. After almost six years since joining Sofra Grup, he has had the chance to create and manage the legal department within the organisation. With the help of his two in-house counsel and two outsourced law firms, Döker has dealt with a large workload highly effectively, including over three thousand projects around Turkey and more than two thousand client and supplier contracts of approximately $600m. Being given the opportunity to sculpt the department enabled him to set the foundation for a strong and trusted function, something he initiated by, ‘choosing in-house lawyers to work with, by setting up the job description of the lawyers and the department itself but I shall admit when this is a new experience for the business to have to work with a legal department, there was a resistance, but now they give credit to the importance of having an in-house legal team’. Döker strongly believes in the advantages of sharing knowledge with the business, adding: ‘That’s why I personally delivered several training sessions all around Turkey to a wide variety of individuals, including regional directors and executive board members’. Döker positions himself as a multi-competent business partner and aims to facilitate the company’s overall strategy with an acceptable level of legal risk.