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

The past year’s first challenge was the global recession after the pandemic and the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Financial institutions and crossover investors were hesitant for investing in or financing new projects. So, this decreased the projects’ pace and number of deals. After the pandemic, the motivation of employees to adapt to coming back to a full-time office was also challenging.

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

ESG topics and sanctions are getting more important day by day all around the world and Türkiye is not an exception. The previous generation of lawyers was more focused on litigation, of course, still this is crucial, but in our generation, the preventive law has been getting more important and most clients and companies are now happy to prevent disputes by executing very well-drafted agreements. The next generation’s lawyers will be the ones who excel at using technology. So, the short answer is in-house lawyers should focus on ESG topics and sanctions, but never forget the importance of being able to use technology.

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?

Standardisation and automation are critical for efficiency, so legal teams will have more time to focus on higher-value work. After I started to work for my company, I realised that there are too many NDAs and consultancy agreements that are negotiating. We did have a standard NDA draft, but we did not have a consultancy agreement draft and the business departments were asking us to provide NDAs and comment on the consultant’s draft agreements. This standard work was time-consuming. So, I decided to take the initiative and dedicated an important time of mine to creating standard consultancy agreements from the scratch both in English and Turkish. I uploaded the drafts for both consultancy agreements and NDAs on the common file and encouraged business departments to use the drafts. I inserted some internal notes to direct them. In the beginning, the business units were not comfortable using the standard drafts themselves and asked us to share them with them but with time they get used to this. Now, not only the workload of standard drafts is not heavy on our department and my colleagues can focus on more creative works, but also business units are also happy that they do not wait for the legal department’s approval to start standard agreement negotiations.

We are updating the templates in accordance with new legal topics and trends. For instance, we have revised some clauses in accordance with the personal data protection law and regularly remind the business units to use the drafts on the shared areas instead of the documents on their desktop or mailboxes. As the next step of our automatisation and standardisation, we are planning to prepare a playbook of our companies’ opening positions, fallback provisions, and redlines.