About

A business-oriented commercial lawyer, Hakan Bekiroğlu always strives to invest a lot of personal enthusiasm in his work. As chief legal officer at Tofaş, the market-leading company in the automotive sector in Turkey, Bekiroğlu has introduced many changes in the legal department since his arrival in the company. He restructured the organisation of the legal department, redefined the roles and content of the legal services provided to the company and implemented a sophisticated IT infrastructure, including things such as agreements and document retention. Leading all the legal functions of a foreign-owned company (Tofaş is a joint venture of Fiat and Koç Holding) listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, with wide sales in the region and a wide variety of import and export operations, can be quite challenging. ‘As the person in charge of the legal department, the biggest challenge has always been to set a structure that manages the risks of all those aspects of the company combined with right ingredients for providing the best service to the company’. He believes that the legal team should not be considered as the ‘end’ but rather as ‘an enabler of business success where operations perform extraordinary acts on the high-rope, while we as lawyers set a reliable safety net beneath them’. He sees the role of the in-house departments becoming more and more demanding in the future, ‘as the involved aspects of legal support in modern age management are of great importance’. Bekiroğlu actively participates in meetings and collaborations with governmental authorities regarding legislation that have or could potentially have an impact on the industry.