In March 2019, our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke at a session of the Istanbul Bar Association’s IT Law Commission, joining fellow practitioners for a working-session conversation on how technology law is reshaping daily legal practice in Turkey.
The central thesis of the session was clear: technology law is no longer a separate specialty sitting next to the rest of the profession — it has migrated into the heart of corporate, IP, employment and dispute work, and the practitioners best positioned for the next decade are those who treat the technical substrate of their clients’ businesses as a first-class part of their craft.
From commission to working practice
The conversation cut across the topics the IT Law Commission tracks: personal data protection, electronic evidence, e-commerce, intellectual property in the software age, cryptocurrencies and the emerging on-chain layer. Mümtaz emphasized that commissions like the Bar’s IT Law Commission play a quiet but decisive role in shaping the practical vocabulary the profession ends up using with regulators and courts.
Why the Bar matters in tech law
Closing the session, Mümtaz returned to the public-good role of Bar commissions: they convert the experience of dozens of practitioners into shared interpretive guidance, which in turn helps clients, judges and regulators land on more predictable outcomes — a value that compounds over years.
