About

A legal career that crossed the border before you did.

Most attorneys build their careers in one legal system. I have built mine twice — first in Turkey, then in the United States. For my clients, that is not trivia. It means their lawyer knows, personally, what it takes to start over in a new country and succeed under its rules.

Chapter one · Istanbul

The courtroom years

I began my career as a litigator in Istanbul, appearing before the city's commercial courts on disputes that ranged across commercial, tax, and intellectual property law, as well as aviation, media, and employment matters. Litigation teaches a particular discipline: you learn to build a case fact by fact, to anticipate the argument coming back at you, and to explain complicated things to busy judges — plainly, and under pressure.

Those habits never left. They are the same habits that build a persuasive asylum declaration or catch the quiet problem in a naturalization application before the government does.

Chapter two · Corporate counsel

Inside a multinational

I then moved in-house, as corporate legal counsel at Petrol Ofisi A.Ş. — one of Turkey's major energy companies, then owned by Doğan Holding and Austria's OMV. I advised executives on day-to-day legal strategy and worked on the due diligence for OMV's acquisition, seeing from the inside how decisions are made when the stakes are measured in reputations and livelihoods, not just numbers.

In-house work teaches the opposite lesson from the courtroom: how to prevent the dispute instead of winning it. Both lessons matter in immigration practice, where the best outcome is usually the problem a client never has.

Chapter three · England

The international turn

I earned an LL.M. in Comparative International Commercial Arbitration in England, studying how legal systems resolve disputes when the parties come from different countries, languages, and traditions. Alongside practice, I published in peer-reviewed Turkish legal journals and lectured as a volunteer at the Istanbul Bar Association — on arbitration, energy law, oil and gas, and the regulation of shale gas.

Comparative law sounds academic until you sit across from a client whose life spans two legal systems. Then it is the most practical training there is.

Chapter four · Illinois

The American chapter

Today I practice U.S. immigration law as a member of the Illinois bar. I represent people seeking asylum, permanent residence, and citizenship — and I advise businesses and counsel on Turkish-law questions that cross the Atlantic in the other direction.

I chose immigration law deliberately. It is the field where everything I have done — courtroom advocacy, corporate judgment, comparative training, and the lived experience of moving a career across a border — converges on a single question that could not matter more: whether someone gets to build their future here.

If your life crosses borders, your lawyer's experience should too.

The fastest way to find out whether I can help is a thirty-minute conversation.

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