Fatma Nur Calisici

Founding Partner

Fatma Nur Calisici works at the intersection of international law, national security, cross-border commerce, regulatory compliance, and strategic legal advisory, bringing approximately fifteen years of cross-border experience to matters involving businesses, investors, institutions, and internationally active clients.

Her professional and academic formation spans both civil-law and common-law traditions and several jurisdictions. She studied Belgian law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles before earning her LL.B. (Hons) at Swansea University. She subsequently completed an LL.M. in International Maritime and Commercial Law at Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and the Institute of International Shipping and Trade Law. She also undertook Turkish legal studies at Galatasaray University and pursued advanced graduate study in National Security and U.S. Foreign Relations Law at The George Washington University Law School.

This comparative legal formation informs a practice concerned particularly with matters that sit across conventional boundaries: public international law, international trade and regulatory compliance, defense and strategically sensitive industries, cross-border transactions and disputes, international commercial matters, and the legal dimensions of national security and foreign relations. Her transatlantic work has further developed this perspective through sustained engagement with matters connecting the United States with European, Turkish, and wider international legal and commercial environments.

Her work frequently involves translating complex legal and regulatory questions into practical courses of action. For clients confronting cross-border or strategically sensitive matters, she prepares written legal and strategic assessments, advisory memoranda, regulatory and compliance analyses, and transaction-specific reports, designed not merely to identify applicable rules but to explain their implications for the client's commercial objectives, institutional relationships, exposure, and available options.

Her professional experience also extends beyond conventional legal advisory work into corporate leadership and complex commercial negotiation. She has worked on legal and strategic matters affecting maritime trade, international commerce, defense-related transactions, corporate structuring, compliance, and cross-border business relationships. She serves as Chairwoman of Lotus Construction Chemicals and Head of Compliance & Mergers at Greywolf Industries, roles through which she has participated in strategic partnerships, negotiations, and commercially sensitive matters across international markets.

Alongside practice, Calisici maintains an active engagement with legal scholarship and international legal discourse. Her research examines contemporary problems arising in the areas in which her professional and academic work intersect, particularly where established legal doctrine has struggled to keep pace with changes in security, technology, international commerce, armed conflict, and State practice.

Her scholarship has been presented in panels and scholarly sessions convened by internationally recognized legal societies, universities, institutes, symposia, colloquia, conferences, and congresses. These engagements focus particularly on emerging legal problems, unresolved doctrinal questions, and areas in which existing legal frameworks require renewed interpretation in light of contemporary practice. Through this work, she contributes to the continuing international conversation between *legal doctrine, institutional practice, and the realities to which law must respond*.

Her broader international experience includes work and study involving Europe, Türkiye, and the United States. Earlier in her career, she volunteered with BAWSO in Wales, supporting work involving minority communities affected by abuse and violence alongside public institutions and civil-society actors. She was also selected for a Criminal Justice and Counter-Terrorism internship at the University of Central Oklahoma, through which she gained exposure to American criminal justice and public institutions, including engagements involving the FBI in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

Across approximately fifteen years of cross-border professional experience, including an increasingly substantial transatlantic dimension, her work has developed around a consistent premise: sophisticated international matters rarely belong exclusively to one field of law, one jurisdiction, or one institutional perspective. Effective counsel therefore requires the ability to understand how legal doctrine, regulatory systems, commercial interests, national-security considerations, and institutional realities interact across borders.

At Huntington & Chamberlain, she brings that integrated perspective to the Firm’s international and strategic practice, combining comparative legal training, cross-border professional experience, scholarly engagement, and commercially grounded analysis in the service of complex matters requiring discretion, precision, and careful judgment.

Senior Strategic Advisor | International Business, Complex Disputes & Critical Industries

Hasan Şerefli brings to Huntington & Chamberlain a career spanning international business, finance, media, elite sport, industrial development, and strategically sensitive sectors. Across those fields, his work has been defined by an unusual capacity to understand complex organizations from the inside, identify the interests and evidence that drive difficult situations, and bring commercial judgment, institutional experience, and practical diplomacy to their resolution. That instinct was formed early.

Şerefli grew up observing enterprise not as an abstraction, but as a living system. His father, Malik Şerefli, a respected figure whose judgment and leadership profoundly influenced him, established an artificial-leather and coated-fabric manufacturing operation in central Istanbul. Its development exposed Şerefli from an early age to manufacturing, product innovation, procurement, production, sales, distribution, and the difficult coordination required to transform an idea into a commercially viable product.

At the same time, another inheritance shaped his understanding of endurance and judgment. Through the accounts of elders in his family, he grew up with the history of ancestors whose journey to Türkiye had taken them across the formidable terrain of the Himalayas on horseback before they ultimately settled and cultivated the lands that became their home. The stories were not simply family history. They transmitted an ethic: difficult terrain is navigated through resilience, adaptability, judgment, and an ability to continue when the obvious route disappears.

Those two influences—the discipline of enterprise and the memory of an arduous journey—would become recurring themes in Şerefli’s professional life.

From Cross-Border Enterprise to Global Business

Şerefli entered international business at a young age, developing experience in finance and factoring and working across markets including China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and parts of Africa. His career subsequently expanded through the Caucasus and Central Asia, bringing him into contact with multinational businesses, cross-border commercial relationships, financing structures, distribution networks, and the practical realities of operating across different political, cultural, and regulatory environments.

Following graduate business education in North America, he continued his corporate career there, advancing through positions within major international organizations before establishing and developing businesses and distribution networks of his own.

Over time, his work evolved from participation in individual transactions toward the design and management of the structures behind them: commercial relationships, market-entry strategies, distribution systems, negotiations, partnerships, and the resolution of problems arising when multiple stakeholders, jurisdictions, and commercial interests converge.

Today, his entrepreneurial and advisory activities extend particularly to defense and critical industries, construction chemicals, plastics and industrial materials, international commerce, and strategic business development.

Media, Public Interest & the Justice System

Şerefli’s career has also crossed into documentary filmmaking and public-interest media.

His international documentary work included Kids Behind Bars, filmed across seven countries and recognized with an Emmy Award in 2003. The project examined juvenile justice and the treatment of young people within criminal justice systems through a comparative international lens, bringing audiences into institutions and circumstances that are ordinarily difficult to see from the outside.

The significance of that work extended beyond television. Examining juvenile justice across different societies required the same comparative instinct that would characterize much of his later career: understanding how institutions actually function, distinguishing formal systems from their practical operation, and examining complex questions through the experiences of the people affected by them.

Media nevertheless remained one dimension of a much broader international career. Şerefli continued developing businesses and international projects, ultimately establishing substantial interests in industrial and strategically significant sectors.

International Sport, Governance & Dispute Resolution

Sport constitutes another major strand of Şerefli’s professional experience.

Following his early football career in Türkiye and an injury that redirected his path away from competitive play, he developed experience across other dimensions of the game, including officiating in North American leagues and subsequently football administration, international competition, talent identification, and organizational matters.

His work has involved international football environments associated with FIFA, CONCACAF and CONMEBOL competitions, Olympic qualification, and national teams across North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. In these settings, he has contributed to the coordination and effective operation of competitions and organizations in environments where sporting, institutional, commercial, and human considerations frequently intersect.

His experience extends beyond tournament operations. Over the years, Şerefli has been involved in matters concerning player identification and development, club and federation relationships, player-related transactions, institutional disagreements, competition-related incidents, and disputes arising within professional football.

That accumulated experience has made him particularly valuable when a dispute cannot be understood from documents alone.

In appropriate sporting and commercial matters, his contribution has included fact development, documentary review, evidentiary assessment, chronology reconstruction, industry analysis, expert input, stakeholder engagement, negotiation support, and dispute-resolution strategy. His familiarity with how sporting institutions and commercial actors operate in practice allows him to identify distinctions that can be decisive in contentious matters: what happened, what can be demonstrated, what industry practice requires, where institutional interests actually lie, and where a workable resolution remains possible.

His approach favors professional, proportionate, and negotiated solutions where circumstances permit them, without losing sight of the evidentiary and commercial realities necessary to protect the interests involved.

Strategic Industries & Complex Matters

The same method now informs Şerefli’s work in defense, construction chemicals, plastics, industrial production, and other critical sectors.

After decades spent operating businesses rather than merely observing them, he approaches commercial disputes with an understanding of how products are developed, financed, manufactured, certified, sold, transported, distributed, and paid for—and of where relationships can break down along that chain.

In complex matters, he works alongside legal and technical professionals on commercial fact development, document and evidence organization, transaction reconstruction, industry-practice analysis, stakeholder mapping, technical-commercial assessment, negotiation strategy, and settlement architecture.

This role is deliberately distinct from the provision of legal opinions reserved to appropriately qualified legal professionals. His value lies in supplying something equally important to sophisticated representation: the ability to reconstruct the commercial and institutional reality within which the legal problem arose.

From Participant to Strategist

The apparent diversity of Şerefli’s career—finance, filmmaking, football, manufacturing, defense, industrial materials, international commerce—is ultimately connected by a single discipline.

He has spent decades learning how complex systems behave when capital, institutions, personalities, evidence, regulation, competition, and commercial interests collide.

That experience has progressively moved him from participant to executive, from executive to entrepreneur, and from entrepreneur to strategist. Today, in several of the industries in which he once operated principally as a commercial actor, he is increasingly called upon to help structure transactions, navigate institutional relationships, evaluate difficult factual situations, and contribute to the resolution of disputes.

At Huntington & Chamberlain, Şerefli brings this multidisciplinary experience to matters requiring strategic judgment, international business intelligence, industry knowledge, factual and evidentiary analysis, negotiation, and sophisticated dispute-resolution support.

His perspective reflects a principle learned long before his corporate career began: complex terrain is rarey conquered by force alone. It is navigated by understanding the ground, knowing the actors, preserving perspective—and finding the path others have over

Hasan Serefli