About

With almost 30% of the market share, Aksigorta is one of the biggest insurance companies in Turkey. In order to support its position in the market, the company employees a team of 13 in-house lawyers, led by senior counsel Serra Sener. The in-house team has a recent track record of successfully negotiating with leading companies in their respective sectors, including Enerjisa, Turk Telekom, Carrefour and Acibadem. Aksigorta’s legal team believes that process improvement is key to improving the efficiency of their work for the company. The team recently worked with Aksigorta’s IT department to create an automation system for litigation and case law, improving the handling of files and reducing associated costs. Sener comments:‘Now we are working on another automation system, it is very important to keep the costs low, enabling our lawyers to focus on important issues and advise management rather than dealing with simple but time consuming matters’. Innovation is very important to the team, which has a culture of encouraging lawyers to step out of their comfort zone. As an example of this, Sener explains how the team recently supported Aksigorta’s move to sell insurance policies online in collaboration with various websites, an area of business that was new to the company’s portfolio of products. For companies in the insurance industry, regulatory changes and ambiguity in Turkey frequently cause big challenges. Sener explains that ‘adapting to regulatory changes should not be understood as a legal team learning the new rules. Regulatory change has big impacts on big companies. It is an extremely complicated, expensive and time consuming process. This is a process happening at all levels from the management to almost 2,000 or more agencies and the secondary institutions’. The legal team is conscious that timely and solid advice is extremely important in times of quick change, and in a big market with big players, they are proud to be able to answer the strategic needs of the company in an efficient and sound manner.