Legal director | GittiGidiyor - eBay Turkey
Ayşen Aksu
Legal director | GittiGidiyor - eBay Turkey
In-house lawyers should always have a positive attitude and have to deliver on time. The most important thing is we must be very flexible and take the risk when needed and concentrate on the increase in your risk appetite all the time. Always find a customised solution to a build strong relationship.
I believe in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive, exceedingly efficient business world, transformative and disruptive thinking, combined with data and technology, is taking strategic partnering between lawyers and their business partners to a whole new level of conversation. Understanding and contributing constructively to the business is a crucial thing. In my opinion the below skills are critical for effective client engagement:
Webinars are a useful resource, allowing us to take training or know how exchange without the travel. We also using document and contract management platform that tools that streamline or automate creating templates, and signature process.
Wunderlist and Slack is used keep my team’s work in one place. With these tools we keep our notes, attachments, to-do list in one place and we can access from any device.
Lexology is the best tool for searching information for legal briefs, memos, letters and other legal documents.
We also keep our records in the cloud storage. This can provide us access to important files and information while we’re on the go and even on our mobile phones.
Amendments to the Payment Law (Turkish PSD2). The Payment Law (Law) was being discussed by the Turkish Parliament for a while and published in the Official Gazette. During the proposal’s discussion, some members of the parliament submitted a last-minute change regarding marketplace platforms will qualify as payment system if and when the thresholds to be determined by the Central Bank. In this respect, the “commercial agent” exemption that we are benefitting from may no longer be available and marketplaces should be deemed as a payment service provider. The thresholds are not defined yet, so we keep monitoring the Central Bank and try to understand the next steps.
Digital Service Tax: The Proposal for Digital Services Tax (DTS) published in the official gazette. The scope of DTS is for all types of online advertising services; the sale of audio, video or any digital content in the digital environment; The provision and management services of the digital environments that allow the users to interact with each other(including the services that are performed to enable or facilitate the sales of goods or services among the users), The threshold is with annual worldwide revenue of €750m or more (TRY equivalent considered) during the previous fiscal year, and with a total amount of taxable revenues from the digital services obtained in Turkey exceeding TRY20 million will be subject to DST. (The President is authorised to reduce the thresholds down to zero or increase by three folds for each digital service type either separately or collectively. The DST will be imposed at a rate of 7.5% (the president is authorized to reduce the rate down to 1% or increase) we worked on to lobby in activities in order to reduce the rate and explain an inevitable consequence for e-commerce and other online providers.
The most important thing we need from our outside counsel is to be practical. The outside counsel needs to understand that law review answers may be interesting, but they are not very useful to us. We always need practical advice, things that work in the real business world based on real world experience – and which show us that the outside understand the context of the answer within the realities of our business. Therefore, we should be clear about our business’ objectives and asking the right question to the external counsel is important. Also encourage collaboration is the key. In other words, asking feedbacks from our outside counsel and implement a common set of guidelines to standardise the work.
The relationship between in-house counsel and external law firm should be friendly and cooperative, communication and personal contact are also essential.
Despite a huge increase in the number of women lawyers/in-house counsel employed in legal professional services over the decades, the proportion of women at the partner level, director level has changed at a much slower rate. Embracing diversity and inclusion is not only the right thing and also crucial for organizations. We should reflect more on the management of Inclusion and alternative work arrangements. Inclusion is not about simply employing or retaining more than zero people in a short list of diversity categories on a checklist. That said, specific targets for greater inclusion that are appropriately defined based on the region and organization help to ensure progress.