Av. Serkan Kara, Founder, Serka Law Firm

Attorney at law, founder of Serka Law Firm.

In the legal profession since 2015. Trained in Turkish and continental civil law with a Bachelor of Law (LLB) from Uludağ University Faculty of Law in 2015, and read in Anglo-American common law at the University of Cologne. The legal position of foreigners and citizenship by investment sit at the centre of his work; software and machine learning are a second competence beside the advocacy.

• 28.04.2016Entered on the roll
• CCBEEuropean lawyer’s identity card

Av. Serkan Kara is the founder of Serka Law Firm. He is an attorney of the Istanbul Bar, registered with the Union of Turkish Bar Associations and a holder of the CCBE Lawyer’s Professional Identity Card, and he has been in the legal profession since his traineeship began in 2015. He works on matters in which two legal systems have to agree at once, and he reads every file from its documents and the sources they rest on before a line of it is written.

Two legal families, on record

On the Turkish and continental side the record is an admission to the Bar, and it carries dates. His traineeship ran before the courts from 17 March 2015 to 17 September 2015 and with an advocate from 18 September 2015 to 18 March 2016, a full year. The board of the Istanbul Bar Association entered him on the roll by decision of 28 April 2016, his Avukatlık Ruhsatnamesi, the Turkish certificate of advocacy, is dated 2 June 2016, and the Union of Turkish Bar Associations carries him on its register. The roll entry is public: Istanbul Bar roll.

On the common-law side the record is a transcript. He read law at Uludağ University and spent 2012 and 2013 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Cologne on Erasmus, on its United States law programme, CUSL: US family law, business law, legal negotiations and American legal terminology. Two of those subjects were graded vollbefriedigend, a grade that, on the scale the transcript itself describes, 10 to 12 per cent of candidates reach. The transcript is sealed and apostilled. The two families read the same contractual clause differently, and a foreign client’s exposure usually sits in the space between the two readings; reading both is what lets a file opened in one country hold before a court, a registry or a bank in another.

• Law diploma, Uludağ University, 2015
• Transcript, page 2: the grading table

The CCBE Lawyer’s Professional Identity Card, created in 1978, is issued in the CCBE’s name by the national bar once it has verified that the applicant is a lawyer currently authorised and registered with it. It identifies its holder, in the CCBE’s official languages, as a lawyer admitted in his own country, eases his access to courts and institutions outside it, and is recognised by the European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance, as the CCBE’s own page states.

Method

He enters a file in a fixed order: the document itself, then the statute or the scientific source it rests on, then every date, figure and register entry measured against its source; the written word comes last. Beside the law he reads medicine, pharmacology, forensic toxicology and social psychology in their primary literature. Where a matter rests on a medical report, a medicine’s authorised product information or a laboratory result, the published text of that science stands in the pleading beside the statute, so the knowledge a judge has to weigh reaches the judge with its source. Official letters and expert reports are read in the same way, against the file and the sources they cite. His articles are written with the same discipline.

Foreigners before the Turkish state

The legal position of foreigners in Türkiye has been at the centre of his work since his first years in the profession, and the trust placed in him there stands on the record of four foreign states. The Consulates-General in Istanbul of Kyrgyzstan (20 June 2016), Kazakhstan (11 July 2016), Uzbekistan (9 March 2017) and Ukraine (11 March 2019) appointed Av. Serkan Kara, by general powers of attorney under their seals, to act before the Turkish courts, enforcement offices, ministries and migration authorities. The Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz instruments add the power to obtain, from public and private institutions, the information and documents that concern the consulate and its nationals. He conducted the consular representations under these genuine powers of attorney, received officially and in person from the consulates general, and he still carries them on from time to time.

• Kyrgyzstan, 20.06.2016
• Kyrgyzstan, sealed page
• Kazakhstan, 11.07.2016, No 471
• Uzbekistan, 09.03.2017
• Uzbekistan, sealed page
• Ukraine, 11.03.2019
• Ukraine, sealed page

The images are the sealed pages of the instruments, which are drawn up in Turkish. The issuing consulate-general, the date and number of each instrument and Av. Serkan Kara’s name remain legible; identity numbers, addresses, a telephone number, the names of the signing consuls and every signature, those drawn across a seal included, are blurred in the image itself.

The field side of that trust was the Kumkapı Removal Centre in Istanbul, where he worked alongside the consuls of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and with the deputy governor then serving as Istanbul’s Provincial Director of Migration Management. That work laid the ground for an amendment to Law No. 6458 on Foreigners and International Protection, the statute that governs how foreigners enter Türkiye, stay there and are removed from it, and the statute on which the firm’s deportation and entry-ban work rests today.

A foreign state’s record can also take the form of a list. On 1 October 2026 the consular section of the Consulate General of Romania in Istanbul confirmed in writing that Av. Serkan Kara is “on our list of lawyers”, the list the consulate provides to Romanian citizens who ask it for legal advice. The reply is reproduced below; it names no official and carries no personal number, so nothing in it is blurred.

• Romania, 01.10.2026

Technology in the practice

He has written software and worked on hardware since the age of eleven, in the MS-DOS years, and today works on machine learning at code level. He is a member of the Google Developer Program at its Premium tier, with a public profile at g.dev/serka, a member of the Apple Developer Program, and the architect of the Serka app. It is a second competence, and it stands beside the advocacy rather than inside it.

A technology dispute usually turns on a technical fact before it turns on a legal one: how a model pipeline was assembled, where its training data came from, which processor holds what and under whose law, what a platform’s own terms already bind the client to. He establishes those facts by reading the system itself, so the technical answer and the legal one arrive in the same document. The firm’s work for such clients is set out under technology law, data privacy and crypto.

Lists, offices and languages

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s list of lawyers in Turkey of October 2025 carries the firm he founded, under its Turkish name Serka Hukuk Bürosu, with his name inside the entry; the ministry compiled it from what the listed lawyers supplied and describes it as informational, not a recommendation, and it is cited here on that footing. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute carries him in its lawyer directory. He serves as Vice President of TÜSODER, the Turkish consumer-rights association, and his commentary on consumer and commercial law has been broadcast by CNN Türk, A Haber, Flash TV, Beykent TV and the DHA news agency. English has been at native level since he was seven, which is why an English contract is read rather than translated; German came from years in Germany. He holds a ten-year United States B1/B2 visa.

Where the record is applied

The record is applied most visibly in Turkish citizenship by investment, where the route, the valuation, the banking chain and the title-deed annotation have to be correct at the same time, and in deportation and entry-ban matters under Law No. 6458.

The full biography

The complete account of his education, admissions and practice is published at serkankara.av.tr.