Team size: 10

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

On top of our legal and compliance responsibilities, my team and I are assigned to coordinate and lead the ESG in our company. This new role as an in-house lawyer certainly put us in the driving seat of designing the overall strategy of the company. Since sustainability regulations have not been matured yet in Türkiye; persuading, motivating and forcing the business to take concrete action is a real challenge. Green deal, German value chain DD act, EU circular economy action plan are the main pillars and guides that we try to translate to our internal clients and have them internalised the to rethink and redesign to their daily routines. In other words, newly taken ESG responsibility is one of the biggest proofs that in-house lawyers are no longer or cannot act reactively. Within the new era of evolving to circular economy from linear economy we as in-house legal team are the main strategy partner of the company more than ever.

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

The legal tech market has not developed yet in Türkiye, while the business environment is evolving to a new era in digitalisation. We are still rendering our services to our business colleagues with rather manual tools who have already transformed to digitalisation phase. I believe as in-house lawyers in Türkiye we need to focus on legal tech, digitalisation, process efficiency in the local market to meet the business requirements, be more efficient, and supporting in reducing our carbon footprint.

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?

We went through several challenges as a company and also as a sector during the pandemic period in the last two years. We truly believe our role as an in-house team to guide and guard the company.

To enhance the business units’ awareness, my team and I revisited our practices on how we deliver the basic knowledge to them to run their daily business while they are alone in the field.

To accept them as first line of defence, no one cannot deny that they need to equipped with the legal tools and support. To this end, we modified our approach on internal trainings to company employees and dealers to be more precise, easy to digest and to do point. In addition, remote working also extend the limits of requirements. Therefore, to create efficiency and sustain the same quality, we launched the online legal tools where business units can easily access to the basics they need whenever they need. I am also happy to share that we have finalised the tests to go live the legal chatbot – “starbot”, with support of AI for basic questions within the entity that will create huge efficiency on daily workload. And one of the proud points of these awareness projects is we use only internal capacity and sources with a minimum budget.