Mr. Takeshige Sugimoto is a co-founder of S&K Brussels LPC and serves as the firm's Managing Director & Partner. His main areas of expertise are data protection, privacy law, and AI regulation in the US, EU 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).

Mr. Sugimoto has also been negotiating with European data protection supervisory authorities over several years, 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.

In addition, Mr. Sugimoto serves for the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington D.C. based thinktank focusing on data protection, privacy and AI regulations as a senior fellow. he is also one of the founders of the Japan DPO Association and serves as a board member of the association.