Midori Takenaka, a Clifford Chance associate in the firm’s tech-digital team, talks AI risk, cyber threats and the curiosity that makes trainees stand out
For Midori Takenaka, an associate in the tech digital team at Clifford Chance, the route in began, as so many do, with a vacation scheme. “As a uni student studying law, I became aware of these things called vac schemes,” she recalls. “I applied to a few, including Clifford Chance. I spent two weeks in the firm over Easter and got my first taste of corporate commercial law.” A training contract application followed, and in 2015, after roughly six months of what was then the Legal Practice Course, she joined the Magic Circle giant alongside a cohort of about 50 other trainees.
Four seats followed: tech digital first, then a secondment to Clifford Chance’s Tokyo office in the finance team, capital markets back in London, and finally project finance. “I actually did a really finance-heavy training contract, but despite that, I decided to qualify back into the tech digital team,” she explains. That was in 2017, and she has been there ever since, coming up to around 11 years at the firm.
Today Midori specialises in CCTO, or complex commercial transactions and outsourcings. “Put simply, that’s technology contracts, for example helping a client procure a big IT system, or contract for a big AI tool,” she explains. “Equally, the client might be the technology provider negotiating with its own customers. Often a lot of this is relevant in an M&A context”. All of it plays out “amongst the backdrop of digital regulation,” an area that has only grown in prominence across her time at the firm.
So what was the hook, given all that finance experience? “I really liked that the subject matter felt super tangible,” Midori says. She qualified the year before GDPR came into force, an event that landed in everyone’s inbox: “Everyone got a million emails saying, ‘Oh, we’re changing our privacy policies. Click here to see your rights.’”
The pace of change is the other draw. “It’s one of these areas of law where the law is always working hard to keep up with technological advancements,” she says. “It’s quite exciting seeing how it adapts and develops, and how different countries and regions choose to react in different ways.”
That change has reshaped what clients worry about. Reliability comes first: “A tech stack basically underpins every business; every business runs on some form of layered IT system architecture,” Midori explains, and making sure it supports continuity “is at the forefront of people’s minds.” Vulnerabilities are a close second. “In the news every day there’s a new kind of cyber security threat, and clients are now really alive to those issues,” she says.
“It’s hard to talk about technology without talking about AI,” Midori adds. Now common-place across all industries, it “creates new risks for businesses,” though not all the answers are technical. “Those mitigations might come from technical fixes and controls, but there’s also a place for legal protections,” she says, calling it “probably the thing that’s at the forefront of most C-suite and board members’ minds at the moment.” The two themes collide, too, in headlines about new AI tools and their ability to exploit cyber security vulnerabilities.
Does advising on all this require an engineer’s grasp of the kit? Not quite. “I am not a systems engineer. I don’t have a computer engineering background, so I don’t think there’s a requirement that you have the technical know-how,” Midori says. “It’s very important that you defer to people with the relevant expertise.” The bridge-building runs both ways: technology experts “help translate the technical workings of their world for me, and I do the same for them.”
For students and trainees hoping to catch the team’s eye, the advice is unambiguous. “The things that really help a trainee stand out are real curiosity and real interest in the work they’re doing,” she says. “It’s not just about executing a task; it’s about thinking around it and asking why.” Debate is welcome, too: “Nothing is ever black and white. There are always questions to be asked and things to be critiqued.”
Sharpening that instinct need not mean a reading list. Just “start recognising where technology, and the legal issues it raises, are popping up in everyday life.” “If you see a story about a new AI model and what it can do, read it, absorb it, and think about what new legal risks it might raise.” The trick is to pause and put your lawyer hat on: “Even just starting to think about what questions people are asking is a really good place to start.”
As for where all this is heading, Midori is refreshingly unwilling to guess. “Do I know where technology law is going in five to ten years? I do not.” The regulatory picture she will be closely watching, she says, is whether the US, Europe, UK and APAC converge or diverge in how they regulate technology’s biggest players. Cyber security isn’t going anywhere either: “The security of data and personal data will continue to be something businesses focus on.”
Would she do anything differently? No. The people and the pace are what make it worthwhile. “I absolutely love my team. There’s a real range of characters and personalities, everyone’s super interested in what they do, and I learn from my colleagues every day.” And the work itself: “I just love that I’m always on my toes, so nothing is ever the same.”
The matters that stick in her memory bear that out. “There have been a few deals in the consumer goods sector which I really enjoyed, because you wouldn’t necessarily think of them as particularly technology-heavy transactions,” she says, before explaining how global supply chains, logistics, customer ordering and payments all rest on IT infrastructure. “Realising how integral technology is to an industry you wouldn’t initially think of as a technology company has been really interesting.”
Midori Takenaka will be speaking on the panel at ‘Talking Tech: A career in technology law — with Clifford Chance’, a hybrid event taking place on Thursday 3 September. In-person spots are now fully booked but you can still apply to attend virtually.
About Legal Cheek Careers posts.
