Experienced lawyers sometimes take non-lawyer Country Manager positions, where the challenges, responsibility, and autonomy may be greater. Natalie Petrushevskaya and Emre Derman have been Country Managers of multi-nationals in Turkey. But while Petrushevskaya’s adventure is just beginning, Derman’s has come to an end.
In May 2014, Russian native and lawyer Natalie Petrushevskaya became Turkish Country Manager at the Eriell Group, a Russian-based manufacturer of oil drilling equipment. But Petrushevskaya has lived and worked in Turkey since 2006, when her Russian employer, the Mosmetrostoy construction company – having won the tender to build the Melen hydraulic tunnel under the Bosporus Strait – asked her to move to Turkey (“without even an office, without anything!”, Petrushevskaya laughs). When the project ended and it was time to go back to Russia, Petrushevskaya recalls, “I said no, I’m staying.”
She joined Tekfen in Istanbul, and for several years she advised the company on its taxation and property ownership issues in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, and Russia. In 2010 Petrushevskaya started in private practice with the Gur Law Firm, where she helped the Istanbul-based firm open its Moscow office and expand its Russian client base. Two years later she joined the Akinci arbitration boutique. And in January of 2014, having grown dissatisfied at Akinci, she joined Bezen & Partners.
Shortly thereafter Eriell, a Bezen client, asked her to come on board as Country Manager, and she leapt at the opportunity.
Petrushevskaya says that Eriell had been searching for someone like her – Russian, multi-lingual, and familiar with the Turkish legal system – for some time. She explains that “for Russian lawyers it’s always difficult to understand the way the system works in Turkey. They need someone who can really explain it from the perspective of a Russian, you know? Everything’s super slow here in Turkey, and quite different, and sometimes it doesn’t speak to a Russian lawyer mind, so you need to explain it.”
Petrushevskaya’s home remains in Istanbul, but she spends most of her time in Konya, where she oversees the production and sale of the company’s Turkey-produced oil & gas drilling equipment and manages some 100 employees. She laughs that the nature of the industry makes for some unique challenges: “There are only two ladies working with the company in Konya. Me … and one working in the kitchen. That’s it.”
Strength of character, at least, should not be an issue. Petrushevskaya admits to having driven a junior lawyer to tears at a previous position, but that same fierceness should work to her advantage with Eriell. She says that “In Konya if you don’t supervise everything is so slow. It’s amazing. You have to be there physically and push and push and push, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why I feel comfortable there, because that’s who I am.”
The company has no in-house legal team in Turkey, and part of Petrushevskaya’s job is to select external law firms – most of the company’s work is divided between Bogazici Avukatlik Burosu and Bezen & Partners in Istanbul and the Turkmenoglu Hukuk Burosu in Konya – and supervise their work. She’s still adapting to the non-legal aspect of the role, however. “I feel different, to be honest with you. I feel different, but I like my new position, because it’s more challenging. Of course there are more responsibilities now, but it’s more interesting. I can use a lot of my knowledge, because after practicing here for 7-8 years, and knowing commercial law and the way Turkish people work, for me it’s easier now to lead the company through the Turkish ways of working.”
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On May 29, Erme Derman, the Managing Director and Senior Country Manager at JP Morgan in Turkey, sent out a short email to his contacts. The email, titled “Change is Good”, stated simply that: “Tomorrow is my last day at JP Morgan. It has been a great 3 years and I am grateful for your support and custom. It’s time for me to seek other challenges.”
Derman’s departure from JP Morgan follows several years after a similar departure from White & Case, which he led in Istanbul for almost a decade. When he left that firm in 2008, Derman recalls, he felt slightly stifled in the law firm world. “As much as I enjoyed being a manager in a law firm, law firms are very horizontal structures, and do not easily lend themselves to active management. It was more about practicing, doing the business, as opposed to doing the administrative side. And I had a passion for the administrative side, I felt that I was good at it, so I was seeking some sort of a management role.”
Of course, he doesn’t deny that JP Morgan’s appeal lies beyond the purely practical. “When the role at JP Morgan came up, obviously there were a couple of other things. JP Morgan is a very prestigious name. The position itself was very prestigious. I was looking forward to perhaps proving to myself, and to others, that I was not just a lawyer, I was someone that could do a bit more than that, if given the opportunity.”
Mission accomplished. Derman explains that, as Senior Country Officer, “the job was essentially to be the face of the bank vis-a-vis regulator and clients and to act as the interface between the head office in London and the bankers on the ground.” Derman oversaw a staff of 60 and business lines that included investment banking, corporate banking, and treasury services. And, though he occasionally used his legal skills and knowledge to help his colleagues (“or at least steer them in the right direction”), Derman emphasizes that “it wasn’t a significant part of my job, actually, and on paper it wasn’t part of my job at all.”
Nonetheless, Derman ultimately found the particular structure of JP Morgan not completely conducive to his interests. “JP Morgan is a great place, but it’s also a very big place, and because of its size, JP Morgan has, justifiably, a very large bureaucracy. So the role that I took on was more of an ambassadorial and less of an actual management role. So in that respect I didn’t get as much of [the management responsibility] as I wanted. But again, and I am always at pains to stress this, that is no fault of JP Morgan, it’s just the way the bank is, and given the regulatory pressures on the bank and given the size on the bank, I now understand why it is that way, and why it probably has to be that way. But I can say that from that narrow perspective it fell short of what I was trying to do.”
And, as he was in 2008, Derman is sanguine about departing from one position without having another set. “I like the flexibility associated with putting yourself out and saying, ‘ok, I’m unemployed, I’m enjoying myself, and I’m open to all kinds of discussions, ideas, etc.’,” he explains. “That allows people to approach me without any hesitation and to discuss all kinds of interesting ideas, and one or two of them might be interesting enough for me to put my mind to it and pursue.”
So one of Turkey’s best known lawyers is on the market. One assumes he won’t be unemployed for long.