Our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu delivered a training session for the Avukat Hakları Grubu — a community of practising Turkish lawyers — on what it actually means to add startup law as a working sub-practice inside a generalist legal career.
The central thesis of the training was clear: most Turkish lawyers underestimate how transferable their existing skills are into startup law, and overestimate how specialized the field is — the practice has its own vocabulary, but the underlying analytical work is the same kind of careful contract reading, risk modeling and structural thinking they already do every day.
The transferable core
Mümtaz walked the audience through which existing skills carry over cleanly: corporate-document literacy, careful drafting discipline, negotiation muscle, dispute-side instincts; and which new vocabularies have to be picked up: SAFEs and convertible notes, option pools, vesting, cap table mechanics, Delaware-style governance documents, and the operational rhythm of a fast-moving company.
The lawyer–founder relationship
The session covered the working relationship between lawyer and founder — and how it differs from the more familiar client relationship many practising lawyers have built their careers around. The founder expects fast, decision-grade answers — yes / no / how — under conditions where the founder themselves is operating at the edge of their information set.
Building a startup-law book
Closing the training, Mümtaz reflected on how to build a startup-law book of business: through ecosystem presence, written work, public speaking and the slow compounding of word-of-mouth that follows a single founder through multiple ventures over a decade.
