A Turkish-American Bar Association Is A Necessity

Image Sevil Özışık received her LL.B degree from Dokuz Eylul University Law Faculty in İzmir and her LL.M degree from Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia. She is a member of both the New York Bar Association in the U.S. and the Istanbul Bar Association in Turkey.  She has also been active in the American Immigration Lawyers Association and is a member of the American Bar Association.
After working at some of New York’s most prominent immigration law firms for five years, she founded her own law firm in 1998, serving Turkish and also other immigrant communities with a specialization in business immigration and related corporate transactions.

As long as she remembers, she has been an active member of the Turkish-American business community as well. She is a member of Turkey's Overseas Citizens Advisory Board. She is one of 8 board members chosen to represent the interests of Turkish citizens living in the U.S. and the only lawyer in the group.  She is also an executive board member of the American Regional Committee of the World Turkish Business Council.

Since the beginning of her career in the U.S., she has always enjoyed practicing immigration law and found this field much more intimate and personal than other practice areas. She possesses a significant distinction from most other American immigration attorneys, which makes her much more understanding, responsive, caring and educated because she knows what it means to be an immigrant in the U.S.  She still believes today that what makes immigration law practice the most enjoyable is also the most difficult part of the practice, which is the human side of the practice and the emotional connections established through the professional relationship. Each approval received from the US Consulate or the US Immigration Service still makes her smile and she tries to reach the phone to give the client the news herself instead of just sending an email.

She sincerely recommends practicing immigration law to young law school graduates or students if they have a strong interest in the immigrant community in the U.S. She cannot imagine a successful immigration attorney not becoming a member of an AILA.
She also supports a collaborative approach of working with business groups and national immigrant rights organizations to keep pressure on Congress until Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) is achieved. By reaching out to all groups, she hopes to achieve change in immigration laws that can and will be lasting and effective.

“It is a privilege to be able to study law in the U.S. The best and brightest students of the Turkish American Community attend law schools here and I believe there is a great future awaiting them,” she indicates.  “It is not easy by any means, but it is enjoyable, it is satisfactory, it is full of vision and it is for a better future. We need more law school graduates to be interested in public service and politics, to serve as district attorneys and judges, to be attorneys in the fast developing areas of cyber security, heath care law, information technology, patents and trademarks, international law, family law, entertainment law, etc.”

Özışık and a group of Turkish lawyers in New York have recently organized the First Turkish- American Law Conference at New York Law School in January 2014 and talked about starting the Turkish-American Bar Association together. “I think we have been taking the right steps and growing not only with numbers but also visions too. And yes, there are still more than enough job opportunities for more immigration lawyers and any other lawyers all around the U.S. as the need for qualified legal services professionals cannot be eliminated from the developed and civilized countries’ future,” she adds.
Last modified onSaturday, 06 May 2017 10:07