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

Over the past year our business is mainly affected by high inflation especially food inflation in our sector. It has caused pricing difficulties in general and sometimes supplier shortage.

We had to renew price increases in hundreds of our contracts in Türkiye and had to deal with our client’s procurement and legal departments to sign addendums to our contracts.

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

I believe that in-house lawyers should focus much more on ethics, integrity and human rights policies now.this will be an important issue for the major companies all around the world. Also, I predict suppliers’ compliance will be as important as our own company’s compliance. This development will require more cooperation between the companies and more training delivered to every employee.

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?

Digitalisation is vital and inevitable for companies regardless of their sector. Legal departments should use this source to be able to measure its services, needs and performance.

We implemented online self- training using digital assistance and it enabled us to reach a wider employee base to deliver online trainings and increase their level of awareness on many important topics such as ethics and integrity and compliance, data privacy and so forth.