On March 15, 2018, our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke at the Startup Law and Entrepreneurship Summit organized by the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University Law Club, held at the FSMVÜ Haliç Campus Conference Hall.
The central thesis of the summit was clear: startup law had moved from a curiosity at the edge of Turkish legal practice to a working sub-discipline with its own deals, doctrines and emerging body of literature — and the law students preparing for the next decade needed to engage with it before the academic curriculum caught up.
Speakers and program
The summit featured a deep speaker line-up including Prof. Dr. Ersin Çamoğlu, Doç. Dr. Naim Demirel, Okan Şencan, Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu, Mustafa Aykut, Kerim Kaya, Arş. Gör. Salih Tayfun İnce, Av. Melih Aksan and Samed Torun, covering general entrepreneurship, law for entrepreneurs, the founding story of startuphukuku.com, the Vircon Group founding-growth-public-sector story, IP in venture-capital investments, why and how a technology startup raises capital, and the founding story of Othersapp.
What Mümtaz spoke about
Mümtaz’s contribution covered the founding and growth story of StartupHukuku and the Vircon Group, with a particular focus on how a startup-focused legal practice can itself be built as an entrepreneurial venture inside Turkish legal practice. The session connected commercial design decisions a law firm makes — positioning, channels, products, pricing — to the structural decisions a startup makes when it builds its first product.
Why this format mattered
Closing remarks emphasized why a university-organized summit with this depth of program is structurally important: it converts a scattered set of practitioner experiences into shared interpretive scaffolding for the next generation of law students — and the long-arc value of that compounds across cohorts.
