What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?

The Fujitsu Group launched a global cloud-based AI platform, known as Kozuchi, that customers can use to enhance the productivity and creativity of their businesses. Our team supported the business on the legal, IP and ethical elements, for example, the customer and vendor contracts, the protection of IP, and the necessary risk mitigation measures given these new types of technologies and business models. Our legal members collaborated globally to address various country-specific issues, such as the differing social awareness and acceptability around AI and data-related business. The revenue from Kozuchi keeps growing and we are proud that legal can help the business accelerate the commercialization of new technologies, such as AI.

What is a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about, and why?
I strongly believe in the power of the individuals working in our legal function, and the necessity to keep empowering each one of them so that they can continue to grow and enable us to maximise our contribution to the business. With that belief in mind, our global legal leadership team has implemented two key programmes. Firstly, the Talent Management Council, which has now been operating for three years. The Council focuses on developing and optimising our talent pool to suit our business needs, growing our professional skills, fostering open mindsets, maintaining the highest levels of professional integrity, and leveraging everyone’s diverse knowledge and experience so that they can perform their best. Secondly, I cannot stress enough the criticality of our digital transformation activities. Our DX not only enables everyone’s best performance on legal matters and projects, but also accelerates our global skill development by facilitating the sharing of our collective knowledge and experiences. Accumulated data under our global DX platform also guides our strategy, supports our business performance and further drives everyone’s development.
Are the effects of AI on the legal world overplayed, or underplayed?
It is inevitable that AI and other advancing technologies will change how legal work will be performed. With that premise, it is critical for each legal member to keep up to date and be skilled in using those advanced technologies. That means that one needs to understand deeply the areas where AI can do better than a human, or not, and keep re-allocating work accordingly. Then one should master how to use AI to get the best results, ascertain such output, and focus human effort on the areas where AI cannot do better. In advising the business, the legal team needs to be sophisticated in leveraging both AI and human output in such a way as to deliver the best results.