About

Oğuz Sami Sarıkaya leads the in-house legal team of LUKOIL’s operations in Turkey, including four lawyers and two support staff. The team reports to the CEO of LUKOIL-TR group companies and is responsible for the global group of companies. In the last year, the team has focused on restructuring and increasing communication with other departments facilitated by a redesign of the office, to decrease the need for lengthy email chains, and the division of the legal team into two divisions based on speciality, pre and post dispute, in order to increase accessibility by the rest of the company and the sustainability of the legal team. The team also provides training programs to related units of the company, on the subjects of law of contracts, title deeds, establishing rights in favour of companies in land registry, legal disputes and competition law issues. Instead of sharing the prepared training texts via e-mail, individual and on-the-job training is provided which enables the team to listen to problems encountered in practice and respond instantly to the questions. Sarıkaya identifies that ‘these trainings have been in progress for two years in accordance with the legislative amendments and on the agenda. Providing these trainings every year helps to maintain the permanence of the information and increasing communication among employees’. As part of the restructuring process, the team has also undertaken changes to its systems of communication with clients, file and litigation management, outside counsel panelling and there efficiency changes. The team is constantly looking to improve and innovate and this has helped them with some large M&A activity and other commercial business in the past year.