Our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu joined the StartupMEF community at MEF University for a conversation focused on what founding and running StartupHukuku taught the team about Turkish startup law as a practice, and what students considering the field should think about.
The central thesis of the conversation was clear: building a startup-focused legal practice in Turkey is itself an entrepreneurial act: the practice did not exist as a packaged category when the firm was founded, and growing it required treating clients, products and channels with the same discipline a founder uses building a company.
From legal practice to product
Mümtaz walked the audience through how StartupHukuku was built as a practice: treating the lawyer–founder interaction as a product, codifying repeated transaction patterns into reusable templates, building a public-facing knowledge base, and engaging with the ecosystem through writing and speaking rather than relying on traditional referral channels.
Advice for students
The Q&A focused heavily on student-stage decisions: which firms or environments offer the best base for someone hoping to specialize in startup law, what skills compound the fastest, and how to think about the early-career trade-off between high salary at a generalist firm and faster learning curve at a specialist one.
Closing observation
Closing the session, Mümtaz returned to a theme he frequently revisits: the lawyer who treats the practice as a craft, not just a credential, tends to be the one who accumulates the long-arc career, and the student years are the cheapest possible time to make that orientation explicit.
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