About

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

Since we have many companies operating in different fields within Kale Group and our legal team supports all of them, we have been involved in many transactions and lawsuits during the last two years. This wide spectrum makes me and my team keep our ear’s to the ground. This continuous challenge supports our professional development and fastens our progress.

The most important of these during the past two years are the investment in Algeria; where we provided legal support to prepare and finalise a shareholders agreement in consideration of Algerian commercial law to incorporate a limited-liable company in Algeria. We have also provided legal support to prepare and finalise the shareholders agreement considering Albanian law to incorporate a company in Albania. It was critical to transfer the capital following an appropriate way due to the different rules.

We have also been involved in the formation of a major partnership with a foreign partner enabling the business reached a milestone in the development of the aerospace and defence industries of Turkey.

Have any new laws, regulations or judicial decisions greatly impacted your company’s business or your legal practice?

We have affiliates in various sectors in our Group, therefore international relations are having significant effects on business life, especially for the aerospace and defence industries. The delicate issue is to harmonise all the international and national regulations at the same time, both of which have different aspects.

Laws on personal data protection, new restrictions related to the contracts made in foreign currencies, and Turkish and American relations [all feature].

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

Our main focus will be in international commerce with the differentiating and developing business habits and data protection. Life is changing rapidly, however the speed of law is not as fast as business [moves]. With the team members, we are all ready to discover and develop new approaches that are appropriate for changing business life.

As our legal team member has a chair on the personal data protection committee for all group companies, we will continue to organise training sessions for company employees and supervise on implementation of data protection mechanisms internally.

We are highly focused on improving legal protection on the everyday commercial practices of our companies. We believe, if the daily commercial practice is perfected once, legal disputes significantly decrease which is the radical solution. For this purpose, we organized in-company trainings for production, sales and export teams in order to explain our legal liabilities concerning production and the necessity to have evidences against incoming claims. We are therefore cooperating with production, sale and export teams by a series of meetings for ensuring compliance with laws and evidencing such compliance.

Considering our group companies’ operations, competition law has been always a major point to pay significant attention. We organise seminars, training sessions and preparing booklets in order to raise awareness of our group.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

We are aware that we are the business partners of the other departments in the Group and our responsibility is to collaborate with them in order to protect their rights and to evaluate their demands within the legal frame.

The ability to understand, to correctly interpret and to be empathetic are the main skills required for learning the reasons of the demands and then finally we could articulate the case at its best.

It is very important that in-house lawyers don’t interrupt the business while providing legal support. Therefore, it is necessary to find a purpose-oriented solution. It should not be forgotten that the priority of the company is to realise the subject of activity and the reason for its existence is to make profit. This attitude builds strong relationships with the business partners. Establishing open communication is essential to analysing issues with the business partners involved. Trust is another element for building strong relationships, so the business partners could reveal all details and not spring unexpected surprises.

As an in-house lawyer of course our priority is the profitability of the company, accordingly the protection of the sustainability of the business must be taken into consideration instead of pointing at the faulty one. Preventive law practices can be extended in the company and inserted into the daily business life. The procedures should be simple and draft texts should be created for the routine works. For mitigating the risks, we have very effective communication skills to understand the different technical data received from the colleagues in the companies. As they are going to convert and simplify the technical data for us, our role is to convert the data to the legal language. We aim to create awareness among employees and the business partners on legal risks and to ensure that they foresee the legal consequences of each step. In this way, some legal disputes against the company can be prevented even before they emerge. Being in-house lawyers is a huge advantage to understand the background of the legal issue thanks to the trust and the transparency of the people.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

The fastest technological advancements such as online checklists, fill in the blank format contracts and standardised documents are reducing daily workloads and the necessity of the in-house legal teams, potentially leading to software solutions like “digital lawyers”. These digital lawyers could only assist the client with the abovementioned fields without interpreting the human-focused needs, however in-house legal teams can be involved in communication based problems more than in the past.  Instead of technical legal issues, in-house legal teams could focus [more] on solving human based problems.

Nowadays, legal life is much more complex. The world became smaller. Most of the regulations as data protection regulations, trade barriers, competition, intellectual property rights are overcoming the boundaries of the countries. As the in-house lawyers we all try to mitigate the risks, on the other hand this widening scope causes new legal nightmares for the companies. When we look at all these developments, still the main actor is the human beings to violate or to obey the regulations.  In consequence, we could use technological tools to ensure staff’s compliance to the regulation.