At GİLT Akademi ’19: “Geleceğin Dijital Hali” (18 April 2019), Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke on start-up law with the talk “The Lawyer’s Place in the Start-up Ecosystem.”
When counsel is worth involving, and when it is not
Founders routinely get this backwards. They defer legal input on the decisions that are expensive to reverse (entity type, founder equity and vesting, IP assignment, the first investment instrument) and then spend money on documents that a template would have handled. The useful test is whether a mistake compounds. A poorly drafted supplier contract can be renegotiated; a cap table with an unvested departed co-founder follows the company for years.
The second thing founders underuse is preparation. Most of what makes diligence painful is not legal complexity but missing paper: unsigned assignments, an option plan promised rather than adopted, resolutions never recorded. Keeping that file current from month one converts a fundraise from an archaeology exercise into a process. Where to start: Startup Law in Türkiye, the investment terms glossary and Startup & Scaleup Advisory.
