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

After the Covid pandemic, many companies adopted remote or hybrid work models to return to the classic full-time in-office format. Not all employees were happy with this.

Some people have been accustomed to working fully remotely, while others prefer to come to the office daily. The most common (and most desired, according to my experience) is the hybrid model, where employees come to work a few days physically during a work week.

Each department’s take on remote work may also differ within the same company; for instance, IT roles are more likely to be remote. In this fluid work environment, the role of managers in balancing people’s workloads and expectations is crucial.

Motivating people who are working remotely is a challenge. Also, while some of the employees are more sensitive to Covid-related risks (and viruses which became rampant) and, for this reason, prefer to wear masks during meetings in person, others accepted Covid as a regular illness.

Another major problem is the belief that remote employees lack work discipline and are less effective. This is a faulty point of view if good project management practices exist, such as deadlines and concrete goals. However, such a negative perspective against remote work (even hybrid work) is shared by some people in the upper management of companies and even among the peers of remote workers who prefer to come to the office daily. Consequently, transparency, communication, and empathy have become crucial to ensure that work is done smoothly and efficiently regardless of an employee’s preference to work from home or office.

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

Cyber security law, data protection and competition law are the crucial areas that house lawyers should focus on over the next few years, regardless of the sector. As tech adoption in Türkiye increases, tech-related legal risks also rise. Therefore, Turkish Competition Authority and Personal Data Protection Authority are becoming more aggressive in enforcing competition and data protection laws.

Collaboration and communication between legal departments and IT (which may not always speak the same language) become ever more important, along with required input from the business side. Legal risks do not exist in a vacuum, so such cooperation is vital to ensure that each key decision-maker in the company sees the risks as a whole.

One idea to increase the compliance level may be to organise unannounced dawn raid-style legal audits focused on competition law, data privacy or other areas based on the needs of the company and then receive or submit feedback to and from each department.

After such audits, in-house lawyers should work with each head of the related department to fix the errors. Internal communication and behaviours that come to light during dawn raid-style audits are great places to start compliance-related conversations and initiatives.

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?

After setting a contract management system in place, we have started to work on pre-set notifications for specific topics such as early termination, termination on cause, and breach of contract for each article of franchise and lease contracts.

This method allows us to submit notifications to notaries on the same day with much less effort. We also adopted automation for adding necessary evidence to notaries’ sent statements, whereby the relevant departments can provide feedback much quicker. This has made the lives of legal and non-legal employees easier.