Team size: Five

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

A recent important project we worked on concerned the securitisation of tender for additional investments and operation rights for increased capacity in domestic, international, general aviation and CIP terminals at the Esenboğa Airport. The general directorate of state airports authority (Devlet Hava Meydanları İşletmesi Genel Müdürlüğü, or DHMI) in the republic of Türkiye initiated the tender, granting management concessions through lease transactions with a goal to expand operations of the Ankara airport. While the financing agreements and ancillary legal documentation are still ongoing projects, the execution of the lease agreement with DHMI and the establishment of the new special purpose vehicle company has been primarily implemented through our legal assistance.

In your opinion, what areas should in-house lawyers focus on over the next few years to prove value to their organisations in Türkiye?

In-house lawyers in Türkiye, particularly those working in multinational firms, often take too much responsibility across a wide range of different law disciplines, different business cultures, and different local law systems. Within TAV Group, we work in collaboration with large legal firms and international finance organisations to coordinate many foreign projects. I think managing this coordination, while minimising risk and deriving from Turkish law principles, is essential. Ethics and compliance rules are another key point of focus for us and have been one of our primary growth areas in the last three years. When the shareholders we work with are large multinational firms with their own set of foreign compliance rules, it’s critical we harmonise those rules with the ones governing our Turkish operations.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

The in-house legal practice is changing fast and companies expect their in-house counsel to proactively avoid, mitigate, and manage legal risks. Sometimes the best innovation available is good people and good time management. The implementations of an electronic document signature system has also been cost-effective and useful in the age of remote working. Additionally, we recently allocated an extra paralegal to our team which has given back valuable time to everyone to focus on important projects.