Mr. Takeshige Sugimoto is the founder of S&K Brussels LPC and serves as the firm's Managing Director and Partner. His main areas of expertise are data protection, privacy law, and AI regulation in the US, EU, UK, China, and Japan. Mr. Sugimoto is qualified to practice law in Japan and New York and is a member of the Brussels Bar Association (B-List), the New York State Bar Association, and the Dai-ichi Tokyo Bar Association.

As a data protection specialist, Mr. Sugimoto's practice includes the establishment and review of clients' data protection compliance systems; representation and defense in disputes involving international data protection law issues, including class actions and negotiations with European, UK, US, and Japanese data protection supervisory authorities; data protection in M&A transactions. He also advises clients on a wide range of issues, including the assessment and establishment of data protection compliance systems during due diligence and post-M&A PMI phases and data protection in relation to cutting-edge technologies and services (e.g., IoT, connected cars, MaaS, AI).

He has also been negotiating with European data protection supervisory authorities over several years, including the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK data protection supervisory authority, the Spanish data protection supervisory authority (AEPD), and the data protection supervisory authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, representing clients in the approval of EU Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) and Processor BCRs under the GDPR, following the European Data Protection Board's (EDPB) opinion on the respective authorities' draft approval decisions for 2021. He also represents clients in their applications for approval of BCRs under the UK GDPR.

Mr. Sugimoto has also been invited as a speaker at various data protection-related events organized by overseas data protection supervisory authorities. In September 2021, he participated in a panel discussion titled "Exploring trends: From "consent-centric" to responsible data practices and privacy accountability in Asia Pacific," as part of an international forum co-hosted by the Personal Data Protection Commission of Singapore (PDPC), Future of Privacy Forum Asia-Pacific Office, and Asia Business Law Institute (ABLI). More recently, in October 2021, he was invited to speak at the "Global Privacy Assembly 2021 Mexico," a large-scale, major event attended by data protection supervisors from around the world, in which he participated as a panelist in "Panel IV: The Challenge of Compliance: The Perspective of Data Protection Officers."

Mr. Sugimoto is also one of the founders of the Japan DPO Association and serves as a board member of the association.