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.
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