Legal manager | Eti
Emre Çotuksöken
Legal manager | Eti
What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?
FMCG companies have lots of projects. An example is the Mutlu Kutu-Loyalty App project, which as Eti’s legal team, we have been involved in. Perfect coordination of internal and external sourcing has taken place in this initiative. In addition to this, we have been providing legal training and practices in different areas of law, such as procurement agreements, competition and data privacy to the relevant departments in Eti.
What strategic priorities are guiding you and your team in 2024?
Significant technological developments; AI; data privacy issues; smart contracts and even blockchain are very important concepts for 2024 and beyond. These concepts will have a special place for in-house counsel; data privacy, regulatory changes and compliance issues or challenges will be our top priority.
Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?
New legal technologies, such as AI-based reporting systems and contract management issues, will play a key role in-house legal counsel’s business manner. Therefore, it will be important to implement these electronic data-based systems internally.
Emre Çotuksöken graduated from Maltepe University-Faculty of Law (Istanbul) in 2002 and has a post graduate degree in International Commercial Law and EU from Istanbul Commerce University.
After working for international law firms from 2002 to 2006, Emre started his in-house legal department with Anadolu Group (Anadolu Endüstri Holding) as a lawyer. He has provided various legal consultancy services for the subsidiaries of the holding company, such as project finance, company formation, corporate documents and IP.
In 2008, he moved to Alternatifbank (“Abank”), a subsidiary of Anadolu Group. As a lawyer at Abank, his tasks were following up and reporting disputes, especially NPL (Non-Performing Loans) related issues within legal procedures; rendering legal opinions regarding banking transactions; letter of guarantees; and drafting all kinds of agreements or legal opinions.
In March 2016, Emre began his role at YapıKredi Bank in the corporate and commercial banking legal support department. Rendering legal opinions for branches and other departments of the bank’s strategic business units on relevant issues; reviewing special credit; and other various kinds of agreements and corporate customers transactions were his main functions. He represented Yapıkredi in the Banks Association of Turkey as an arbitrator for the conflicts arising from individual and private banking issues. Emre was also the president of the Banking and Finance Commission at the Istanbul Bar between 2017 and 2019.
Towards the end of 2020, after YapıKredi, Emre took on the role of legal manager at Eti and founded the internal (in-house) legal department. At Eti, he has been working on various areas of law and providing legal services to the relevant departments internally, sometimes individually or with the cooperation of the internally sourced and out-sourced law firms. Emre’s focus areas are IP, contract law, commercial law, consumer law, labor law, data privacy, competition law and banking (finance) law.