About

Providing guidance to three separate companies in Turkey, the legal function at JTI Turkey supports the business as a whole whilst functioning in a highly regulated market. Legal director Seden Balcı heads the department focusing on the bigger picture of the company strategy and providing direction and vision to pave the way for the achievement of the business goals in its entirety as well as playing a key role in company decision-making process. Senior legal manager Berrak Özen Üzüm and her sub-team oversee marketing activities, ensuring full compliance with tobacco control regulations whilst Gözde Şahin, also senior legal manager, and her sub-team are responsible for ensuring compliance of products with the tobacco regulations, particularly by coordinating applications to obtain licences required to launch and re-launch products. As a result of their roles, the legal team’s nine members are equipped with an advanced set of business oriented skills and mind-set. Balcı identifies that, ‘the department plays an essential role throughout the company’s activities as a whole, starting from the cultivation of tobacco plant in the fields to the production lines, until cigarettes reach consumers at retailers. The law department chaperones operations by providing exceptional legal advice’. The overall objective of the legal team is to focus on the right tasks and to provide faster, easier and cost efficient legal solutions to the business. Accordingly, it concentrates on value-added strategic tasks. The first initiative taken in this direction was the establishment of a sophisticated contract management system for the automation of the entire contract lifecycle, starting from creation until archiving. This system reduced error-prone manual work, eliminated all unnecessary e-mail exchanges between functions and eased tracking as well as introducing flow charts and owners for each stage in the lifecycle. This initiative also served the purpose of adapting technological developments to legal processes and keeping the team up to date. As a continuation of this approach, the legal team proactively volunteered to be a pilot for two global projects both of which have driven efficiency internally, with one even being implemented worldwide, enabling JTI legal teams to prioritise high value tasks while also contributing to the overall goal of reducing bureaucracy globally. Summarising the impact of the team, Balcı had the following to say: ‘JTI Legal Team has a well-deserved reputation within the company for being a trusted business partner. Starting from the establishment of the legal department, legal has gradually built trust with all internal and external business stakeholders by providing solid, practical and innovative advice and a solution-oriented approach. All team members have also adopted the culture of being agile. Consequently, the contribution of legal has been highly valued by all functions, and legal has become one of the major contributors to the business decisions and success’.