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

My biggest challenge has been the shift from being a private practice lawyer to an in-house counsel. At first, the rhythm of the work was very difficult for me to adjust to. During my private practice years, I had time to go into details on every project and every question directed to me whereas my in-house role generally gives me only 15-30 min at most to get back with an answer. The in-house role also means spending a lot of time in meetings, which leaves almost no room to do work or even to read emails, which was very challenging for me, initially, but now I have come up with ways to overcome this problem, though it took time.

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

I think the most important area to focus is to show the company that in-house lawyers can also contribute to the business outside of their legal scope. In-house lawyers can see the business and the works from a 360-degree angle because of their position in the company, something that most functions do not have in an organisation. Therefore, in-house lawyers should transform themselves and their roles to a business partner role and raise their voices at the management table when they observe that their intervention or opinion will matter. I work in an organisation where in-house lawyers are more seen as business and strategic partners rather than lawyers, and I have first-hand experience on how lawyers can be helpful to the business in making the right decisions and taking the right directions. I advise my in-house colleagues to step up to find their place within the management structures that they work with.

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?

I believe that collaboration with other departments in an organisation plays a key role in defining how effective a legal teams work is. With the right collaboration we may achieve the results that we intended when providing legal counsel to the organisation. We have compliance and privacy colleagues, and we generally deal with similar or even same topics in our daily works. I felt that we were sometimes duplicating or even tripling the work that we were doing, so I started an initiative with my colleagues to create a committee where we deal with questions and approval requests from the organisation together. We organised coffee chats on Friday mornings and invited everyone from the organisation who have questions to such sessions. The initiative remains, and we all benefit a lot from those sessions because we listen to each other’s perspectives before we provide our opinion, we share the workload, and the business teams get their answers in a quicker and more efficient manner from all relevant functions.