About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

During the past two years, as the head of legal in Turkey, I have been involved in all strategic matters and day-to-day activities of both pharma and consumer healthcare businesses of GSK, with the support of GSK Turkey legal team. Accordingly, I have supported market access processes for registration and pricing of new GSK products, in-line with government regulations. I have supported the establishment of the company’s localisation strategies both at internal and external scales; supported local contract manufacturing arrangements and business development negotiations with third parties. I have led all high level litigations including product liability cases, and competition law and public procurement law-related matters and established a company-wide data protection project with a cross-functional team which impacted all ways of working of the organisation to ensure full compliance with local data protection laws. Additionally, I am supporting local implementation of GSK’s Consumer Healthcare joint venture with Pfizer in Turkey and coordinating all intellectual property related matters of GSK Turkey together with central teams. I also had a chance to contribute to regional projects at emerging market central level that focused on simplified ways of working for both legal and business staff.

What have been the major external trends that have impacted your team’s work over the past two years (market developments, changing regulatory environment, political events etc.)?

Along with its highly regulated nature and considering variety of pressures coming from different directions, pharmaceutical sector still remains as one of the most challenging, yet dynamic sectors in Turkey. Localisation plan of Turkish government regarding localisation of pharmaceutical products has been one of the most important and impactful developments in the sector over the last years. Along with other governmental initiatives, sudden legislative changes with immediate effects that impacted company’s ways of working and ambiguities in legislative environment that resulted in different interpretation from different stakeholders mainly shaped local team’s work over the past years. Additionally, an increase in digital trends and long-waited Turkish Data Protection Law being enacted in 2016 also impacted legal team’s work.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

GSK is a science-led global healthcare company with a special purpose to help people do more, feel better, and live longer. Our company’s main focus in the next 12 months will shape around this aim. Aligned with business priorities, our legal team will continue to provide its full support to commercial teams with right technical skill sets and risk analyses capabilities while putting patient and GSK values at the heart of our decisions.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused and optimal business advice to your company? If so, how do you get these across to more junior lawyers in the team?

Providing best-in-class legal support for the business is not related to legal and technical knowledge only, but is highly correlated with having strong business acumen and commercial alignment. Hence, key to success for an optimal legal advice is to have a clear understanding of the commercial environment and associated risks. By this way, legal teams will be able to make proper risk analyses with the right balance, alternate solutions that would minimize risks and eventually, contribute to commercial needs. Accordingly, our motto in GSK legal is “Run Legal Like a Business for the Business”. In order to sustain this, we invest time to understand the business priorities and objectives. We keep ourselves up-to-date regarding all sectoral developments and develop right capabilities within the legal team.

I further believe one of the most important key success factors of providing the optimal advice is to have a trust relationship with the business, with full transparency. Thus, I invest time to increase the level of trust with commercial colleagues for sustaining the base to provide the support needed and encourage team members to do the same. Business should feel comfortable to approach the legal department in the first place.

Lastly, I find it highly important to use team resources rightfully and in an optimum manner. Accordingly, within the team we are focusing to prioritise work that has added-value over the business and simplifying ways for working where legal team is a part of. In line with this agenda, this year I had the opportunity to lead a Legal Initiative at the regional level and supported all emerging markets central legal teams to focus on matters that has an added-value to business priorities.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role in evolving in your region over the next few years?

Legal teams that build strong trust relationships with the business are able to contribute more to organisations as business partners. As legal departments continue to demonstrate more added value, I believe we would continue to see legal departments’ evolvement more rapidly in organisations. Being a leadership team member at GSK Turkey, I am proud to contribute both as a strategic legal advisor and a leader. I believe in the upcoming years, we would be seeing more of lawyers being in the management teams of the organisations.