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

This year our priorities can be summarised in two parts; “Zero Tolerance for Corruption ‘’ and ‘’Sustainability ‘’.

As the head of legal department, my top priority is not only protecting legal rights of the company, but also ensuring that my clients’ operations are not disrupted during a legal crisis. Also, as a businessperson, I am responsible for contributing to the profit of the company by creating cost savings and being a part of environmental sustainability projects.

Being a certified ethics and compliance manager, I work closely with the audit department to ensure that employees are disposed to cultivating an honest working environment. Hence, this year, we will be focusing on enhancing our Corruption and Anti-Bribery Policy and strengthening the role of the Hyundai Ethics & Compliance Board, which I am a part of, to contribute the company’s zero tolerance corruption policy.

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

I strongly believe in work-life balance. Throughout my career, I try very hard to maintain this approach. This includes having two types of goals in life: develop myself professionally by adding new talents in my toolbox as a lawyer and living my life fully with utmost curiosity towards new things.

I always try to match my educational goals with the field of activity of my client to provide a high-quality service supported by an academic background. For this reason, I wrote my masters project on franchise agreements in 2005. My Ph.D. thesis, titled “Analysis of Legal Relations arising from Distribution Agreements in Automotive Sector from Competition Law Perspective’’ which was published as a book in 2017, is also related to the main business activities of my client.

I am an expert mediator on labour law, commercial law, consumer law, banking and finance law, energy and mining law and intellectual property law. I also earned the qualification of trademark and patent attorney to support my client’s best interests in IP law area and handle the trademark transactions in the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office.

Finally, to effectively serve my clients in compliance matters by being able to analyse the compliance and ethics side of issues, I became the ethics and compliance manager in December 2021. As a member of Hyundai’s ethics and compliance board, I am involved in preparing the company’s code of conduct and developing company policies regarding business ethics to maintain an honest working environment.

For this year, my goal is to focus on arbitration. To realise this aim, I will be attending a series of trainings and workshops related to arbitration processes in commercial disputes.

In my personal life, I am passionate about exploring other cultures in the world. Thanks to this, I started learning Spanish two years ago. Gradually becoming fluent in another language each day has further enmeshed me in a different culture that amazes me. I believe that every language that a person speaks and every country that a person visits makes it possible to explore a different side of the world.

For this reason, I try to discover as many different countries as possible every year and share my adventures in my travel Instagram account @travelilacs. This year, I have Japan, China, and Hawaii on my travel plans. At this point of my life, I want to keep on exploring places, observe animals in their natural habitat and be amazed by each and every part of planet earth.