About

A US Fortune 500 company that owns globally recognised restaurants such as Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell, Yum! Brands operates 123 stores in Turkey under its Turkish subsidiary. Replicating the company’s global strategy, the legal department at Yum! Turkey recently split the management of its Pizza Hut and KFC brands under a demerger with minimal business interruption, and now has two legal counsel reporting to the chief legal officer Günhan Pikdöken, who is responsible for both brands. Pikdöken highlights the department’s key priority as paving the way for the company to achieve its strategies through problem-solving and risk management, elaborating: ‘A legal team in Yum! throughout the world must be a trusted business partner and have a thorough understanding of our business and our key objectives, helping to achieve those objectives in a cost-effective and legally responsible manner’. As the function primarily responsible for the implementation and monitoring of the global Yum! franchise policy, Pikdöken’s team has created the backbone of a robust and unprecedented franchise system across the country. Other notable achievements for the team include the implementation of a highly effective web-based contract management and litigation monitoring system. This system also allows external counsel to update the system on litigation related matters, creating an internal e-learning system to train employees on matters such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, IT security and insider training. As the only directly foreign-invested company in the Turkish quick service restaurant sector, the team is faced with the challenge of bridging the gap between the reality of the Turkish legal system and the past experiences of foreign executives coming from other legal systems. The lack of franchise regulations, technical errors in food-related regulations and heavy monetary fines, labour inefficiency, and disproportionately pro-labour court decisions are regular hurdles the team have to overcome.