BRIDGING BARRIERS: CONVERSATIONS ACROSS LEGAL CULTURES  

An Oral History Series by Emails to a Young Lawyer
Curated & Presented by Can Yildirim
Interview No. 9

GUEST BIO

Learn more about the Bridging Barriers series, read my reflections on the previous interviews, and watch their recordings HERE.

A Life Between Systems

Ayse Gundogdu, embodies the identity of a “global lawyer.” Both in the path that brought her to where she is now and the skillset she has honed through it, she exemplifies a life lived between systems.

Dual-licensed in Istanbul and New York, she works primarily on U.S. sanctions and export controls from within a Turkish law firm. While the bulk of her work constitutes reconciling systemic differences between these two countries, the differences between how a compliance recommendation is received, how a risk is framed, how a client expects to be addressed each offer a compounding legal-cultural challenge.

Earlier interviewees in this series spoke about transition ranging from the shock of the Socratic method, the challenge of writing differently, the journey of discovering a second legal voice. Ayse’s story begins where those transitions end and the legal market tests one’s ability to grow through them. Having completed her education and located herself across borders in her practice, Ayse simultaneously operates within two systems.

Her journey, like many in this series, begins in Turkiye. She recalled that when she was six years old, her father took her to the main gate of Istanbul University’s Faculty of Law and told her that the best lawyers and judges graduated from there. Perhaps, he said, one day she would too. Inspired from very early on, she charted her course through studying at Istanbul University, completing her internship, working in practice, and then pursuing an LL.M. at Boston University. After passing the New York Bar, she returned to Istanbul. At the culmination of her education, instead of choosing one legal identity over the other, she kept both.

If earlier conversations in the Bridging Barriers series explored how lawyers cross from one legal culture into another, Ayse’s story allows us to explore a more subtle aspect of international education and practice. Her experience is built around questions including what it takes to remain steady when moving between systems, how one can refine professional judgment when certainty belongs to one system and flexibility to another, and how one decides which interpretive instinct to trust in a particular situation.

To all of these questions and more, Ayse speaks with certainty and experience.

From Listening to Speaking

In Turkiye, Ayse’s law school classes were filled with hundreds of students. In these rooms all too familiar to readers of this series, professors lectured and students listened. Ayse witnessed the same classroom setting that dissuaded challenges and questions. When she arrived in Boston, she encountered something entirely different. Professors expected engagement. Classmates interrupted respectfully. Questions expressed rigor engagement rather than incompetence.

At first, she remembers thinking that some of the questions being asked were unnecessary. If a student could locate the answer in a book, why ask and risk embarrassment? Over time, however, she realized that the questions were not means of extracting information but rather methods of honing intellectual engagement and judgment.  That mindset shift required more than language proficiency; it required a different relationship to authority and to oneself.

Ayse described becoming more comfortable saying, “I disagree” throughout the years she spent in the United States. She realized that this particular sentence carried different weight depending on where she spoke it. In one context, it reeked of confrontation while in the other, it signaled a collaborative willingness to engage.

Learning when disagreement strengthens a conversation and when it disrupts one is part of what I would call professional literacy. Ayse developed that literacy through exposure and repetition.

Two Languages, Two Interpretive Instincts

Ayse offered a quote that stayed with me: “One language is one person. Two languages are two people. One license is one lawyer. Two licenses are two lawyers.”

When I asked her what this idea meant in practice, she offered a surprisingly tangible answer. When she works with American lawyers advising Turkish clients, she anticipates friction before it surfaces. She knows how a U.S. attorney’s concise email might be perceived by a Turkish executive accustomed to longer and more flowery emails in Turkish. She understands why a Turkish client expects regular updates and direct access, and she understands why an American lawyer might view that expectation differently.

Her linguistic toolset lies in translation that extends beyond vocabulary and grammar. She translates assumptions and expectations that emerge from the cultures that their respective languages convey.

When working in Turkish law, she often adopts a firmer tone. If the code is clear, she applies it and moves forward. When working with U.S. law, she leaves space for interpretation. She looks for cases and anticipates interpretative disagreements.

While she appreciates the latter system for its openness to argument, she does not romanticize it as necessarily positive flexibility. She recalls moments in her U.S. oriented practice when she wished for a definitive clause that could settle a matter immediately. Certainty has its own efficiency.

Professional Identity and Gendered Reality

Ayse also spoke about something less frequently articulated in comparative legal conversations: the experience of being a woman navigating Turkish legal practice. She explained that success in her environment often requires additional effort, sharper preparation, and greater persistence based on one’s gender identity. It was this environment that shaped her endurance and her awareness of audience expectations through its challenges. While her U.S. experience did not erase those dynamics, it expanded her sense of what is possible in institutional culture.

Her story reminded me that cross-border movement is never purely technical and never context-independent. It interacts with identity which amplifies certain pressures and relieves others.

What I Am Taking With Me

As I reflect on this conversation, I keep returning to the word calibration. Ayse does not see herself as divided between two legal identities; she sees herself as someone who adjusts, or calibrates, according to context. She brings openness from the U.S. into Turkish discussions when it contributes to her operations productivity. She brings decisiveness from Turkish practice into U.S. matters when it offers clarity amidst confusion.

In understanding their respective constraints and utilities, she does not romanticize either system.

When I asked her for one final insight for future lawyers crossing systems and cultures, she said “be open-minded. Do not approach another system with prejudice.” Open-mindedness in this context means suspending the instinct to assume that one’s home method is superior. It also means asking “why?” when interacting with a difference rather than assuming that variations in understandings of hierarchy, tone, and professional distance demonstrate incompetence.

If this series archives stories of growth and becoming, Ayse’s contribution through her story is that becoming global demands refining judgment as much as it does accumulating skills. Two licenses or two languages do not create two separate lawyers, they instead expand the range of skills within which one lawyer can operate and necessitate that the lawyer learn which skills becomes most applicable in which context.