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

I remember the day I started working with the company back in April 2020. The day I started working coincided with the commencement of the global pandemic and the start of my virtual journey with MSD. As an in-house counsel with many years of ‘traditional’ company work experience, being physically far from my partners and not getting a chance to interact with and get to know them stands out as a memorable challenge. It’s important to mention that being able to overcome this challenge was incredibly significant both in the improvement of my personal development and my business acumen.

The other challenge was bringing success, through a virtual environment, in a region with respective legislation, culture, and people that were all new to me. Furthermore, travelling for work during pandemic with my new baby in tow was also very challenging.

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

For many years, in-house counsels were hired based solely on their legal expertise, number of years in practice and their ability to understand the business. In recent years, especially with the rise of digitisation, I believe our role has shifted. In-house counsels need to adopt new sets of skills that enable them to serve as their clients’ trusted advisor and develop new, strategic, and cost-effective methods to produce value for the company.

I think in-house counsels should focus on the essential skills that allow them to be valuable partners to the business, combining new technology and legal knowledge as business operations and jurisdictions become further digitised.

Furthermore, although it may seem like common sense, we need to keep investing in the skill set comprising empathy, active listening, and the making of business decisions incorporate different perspectives and backgrounds.

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?

I think innovation does not necessarily come from implementing technologies that make work more efficient. Adopting working methodologies that are new and tailored to your team, like the agile working method we recently implemented in our department, should be considered innovation.

In terms of the improvement of processes; legal department’s contribution to the overall simplification process of the company would be given as an example. Such support helped accelerating the essential change within the company.

Innovation within the legal department will obviously have an impact on other company departments like business operations, logistics, procurement, etc. To ensure standardisation across our departmental services, we templated a wide range of commonly-used documents and contracts and established a central repository using the current technology platforms of the company. It’s been incredibly useful having an accessible cache of ‘legal approved’ templates that our employees can reach for and amend to suit their needs.