Melih founded Karakullukçu Consulting with Memduh Karakullukçu in October 2007. In April 2008 the company launched a project with Özgür Yilmazel, assistant professor of Computer Science at Anadolu Üniversitesi, to develop internet search tools for legal professionals. In early 2010, the company introduced www.kanunum.com as an online legal search service. Melih is responsible for Kanunum's daily operation, and continues to work closely with the technical team which resides in Eskisehir at the company's R&D unit at the Eskisehir technology park.

In their capacity as a publisher of legal texts, Karakullukçu Consulting has been publicly proposing for some time that authorities electronically publish all high court decisions, in their entirety, at the time judgments are entered. To this end, Melih has led a litigation effort with other lawyers at Kanunum. In 2011, a favorable decision from the Right of Information Act Review Board has agreed that details of final high court judgments are public information which should be made available upon demand. Aspects of this legal strategy, as well as Melih's views as the owner of an electronic legal search service have appeared in interviews published in Turkish dailies Milliyet (7 August 2010), Dünya (18 November 2010) and Zaman Online (11 October 2011), and most recently in a brief article 'Proper Treatment of Gaps in Legal Data and Commercial Electronic Legal Search Services,' an anecdotal discussion penned with fellow Kanunum domain experts Tuğba Karaer and Yeşim Eribol (in "From Information to Knowledge, Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives", eds. M.A. Biasiotti and S. Faro, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications Vol. 236, IOS Press, 2011, pp 83-89.)

Melih returned to Turkey in 2007 after completing a two year term with the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit where he served the judges of the Court, working on appeals involving primarily constitutional, civil rights and criminal matters. Before his work at the Court of Appeals, Melih was briefly with the Legal Aid Society of New York as a Manhattan Borough criminal defense attorney, and worked as a New York correspondent for Milliyet and Hürriyet, and the US correspondent for the Turkish business daily, Referans.

Melih graduated with a B.A. in History and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Brown University, and holds an M.Sc., with merit, in Political Theory and an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics. He earned his J.D. from Columbia University in 2002. Melih is a lawyer admitted as an attorney in New York (2003) and a solicitor in England and Wales (2012).