Team size: Seven

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

After recovering from the pandemic, in all industries, businesses have been working on re-gaining the momentum and growth. This impacted the overall speed and assertiveness required to manage the daily business routine. 2022 was all about catching up with 2019 and implementing the new ways of working – working from home, extreme digitalisation. The public sector was equally active in both enacting new regulations or amending the existing ones and effective enforcement efforts. Ensuring compliance with new regulations has been my number one priority in 2022; to name the most important ones, commercial advertisement and unfair commercial practices regulation, e-Commerce law, amendment to distant sales regulation, social media act, amendment to cosmetics regulation; kept us busy as we reviewed our activities, trained the business teams, implemented action plans to comply with all of them and many others.

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

Fundamentals first: making sure that they are up to date on a daily basis on all the regulations that might impact their industry. Starting the day with the official gazette and checking the decisions of main regulatory authorities should be routine for all in-house lawyers.

Understanding the business and how it evolves; digitalisation and data obsession is re-inventing the way businesses operate, we should find and create opportunities to closely monitor the new projects. Be close to business teams, never assume you know what’s going on in the organisation. Collaboration and open communication are key both to understanding the new business and to ringfence the possible risks.

Collaboration with external law firms; the days that we were appointing a full-service law firm and expecting everything from them are over. Many matters that we handle require high sensitivity and expertise. To be able to identify the most suitable law firm when the issue urgently appears, you must invest in knowing the players in the industry, new law firms, new areas of expertise. Dedicate time to meet with the law firms, have a law firm mapping ready to use when you must decide immediately.

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?

Workload is the biggest problem when it comes to small teams with big responsibilities. We have been recruiting law student interns for some years and this turns out to be a great and low-cost solution to the workload issue. It comes with benefits such as getting to know a young colleague to be, learning from each other, having the opportunity to influence her/him about our wonderful profession.

It has been many years since I started working with under 20-year-olds, I believe it is a wonderful improvement opportunity for the leaders as well. I am almost always amazed by their curiosity, creativity, and eagerness to contribute. On top they instill hope and optimism regarding the future of our community.