Notice Regarding Appointment of Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Bengo4.com, Inc. (Minato-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director, President and CEO: Taichiro Motoe; hereafter “the Company”) is pleased to announce that Shinji Tanaka was appointed its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) on November 15. The goal of this appointment is to reinforce the structure of the technology department, which includes engineers.

In line with its vision to "Drive a paradigm shift for the better world, " the Company has developed and provides a wide range of services, including one of Japan's largest legal consultation portal sites, Bengoshi.com, and the contract management platform CloudSign®. The Company will continue to develop even more innovative legal tech solutions that combine legal expertise and technology.

Shinji Tanaka will become the Company's CTO, having led development departments at multiple companies. With this new structure, the Company will enrich its technological capabilities and development structure and continue to contribute to society leveraging the strength its specialist knowledge and technologies.

■ Profile of Shinji Tanaka, Executive Officer and CTO

Doctor of informatics. Kyoto University Graduate School of Informatics doctorial program completed

Joins Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation after graduation and engages in research and development as a researcher. Joins Hatena Co., Ltd. in 2006. Begins overall oversight over technology as CTO and simultaneously takes charge of the Mackerel SaaS server monitoring service business in 2010. Joins Mercari, Inc. in September 2016 as Vice President. Returns to Japan to become VP of Backend after having set up a development team at a British corporation Mercari Europe. Appointed Senior Director of Backend at the US corporation in 2022. He joined Bengo4.com in November 2024, and was appointed Executive Officer and CTO.

■ Comment from Mr. Tanaka

I am really honored to become the CTO of Bengo4.com, Inc. For over ten years, I have taken on leadership roles within engineering groups as the CTO or vice president (VP) of several companies in Japan and abroad. Through this experience, I have a strong belief that, for sustained organizational innovation and non-continuous corporate growth, it is essential, not only to construct an excellent technology platform, but also to create a work environment that is able to leverage the personalities and strengths of all of the team members and that allows them to grow autonomously.

Today, due to the evolution of generative AI technology, including ChatGPT, more and more services and business models are experiencing a transformation in every industry. In the legal affairs area, AI has the potential to increase efficiency and automation by replacing humans in many tasks that only experts are capable of handling historically, such as contract form review, legal analysis and even legal research. I believe Bengo4.com will be able to go beyond the mere increase of business efficiency, dramatically improve ease of access to legal services and provide more people with quality legal services. As CTO, I will work hard to build an organization that can survive this wave of transformation and exploit engineering to enable the services and businesses aiming to grow to accelerate the development of the Company.