Team size:  Ten

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? 

Our legal team, once formed with all its members -a year ago- has firstly worked on conducting a due diligence on each and every process of our Company. It included many topics such as governance, lawsuits, advertisements, communication with the customers, data protection, employment etc. Upon completion of such analysis, we had workshops with the relevant business/support units to examine what are the issues/processes requiring certain changes to ensure full compliance with the legislation and/or administrative decisions. In addition to this, if, due to business reasons, we were not able to make changes, we have duly calculated the risks of continuing with the same processes. This helped us to understand a general risk road map and calculate our risks in a concrete and efficient matter. At the end: No surprises! As an example, as a player in the telecom market, TurkNet roll outs its on fiber network. As members of the Legal Department, we have spent and continue spending a lot of time in our fiber fields to get a knowledge on the technical issues of our core business. 

Our aim has always been to ne helpful in the most efficient manner.

What strategic priorities are guiding you and your team in 2024?

Our main strategic priority is to work in an agile way with all business units. As the Legal Department, before assisting business units by rendering legal advice, we need to understand very well operational, technical, and business details of the project in question. All such aspects should be assessed well to understand the needs of business units. We, actually, would like to work in close collaboration with the relevant units to ensure that the legal advice is well structured and provides all necessary responses to all questions that the business units might have; instead of offering them boilerplate explanations/answers. We always come up with the following question: “How can we assist you?”  

Our second strategic priority follow our priority mentioned above. In addition to agile working model, we aim to establish a proactive approach to legal disputes management and other processes necessitating legal intervention. We try to provide proactive legal assistance so that we might assess well all risks that our company might be exposed to. Our business units become well aware what they might encounter in case of a non-compliance of a legislation or administrative decision so that they may duly assess the risks and decide accordingly to continue with a project or not.  

Our motto is as follows: We are helping all our company’s departments in a proactive and agile way!

Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

We are passionate about thinking out of the box. As technology moves very fast, regulators may stay one step behind. I believe the challenge is to ensure the balance between the innovative mindsets of the stakeholders and the designation of appropriate legislative and regulative barriers to such mindsets. It is obvious that the market growth and competition are crucial for the development of the industry; however integrity, safety and reliability of the legal system should be well preserved as well. We, as lawyers, should very well establish this balance. Rather than saying no to the issues not clearly regulated, we have to assess well in order to find a creative, out of the box solution. We have to questions ourselves; we have to understand very well the purpose of the business and find alternative ways to come up with a solution for this very purpose.