Senior Legal Counsel Africa Legal

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together one story at a time.
- With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

Responsible for identifying and managing legal risk for the South African and African business. Key point of contact on a day-to-day basis for the business team, and responsible for providing pro-active legal advice, support and risk management.

Job Description

Accountability: Negotiate, draft and review Agreements
- Ensure agreements are drafted as quickly and efficiently as possible while protecting the Bank and mitigating risks.
- Attend to queries as quickly as possible.
- Successful conclusion of agreements, taken into account how certain clauses would impact the Bank' strategy.
- Consider, comment, negotiate and give advice on commercial agreements and schedules.
- Assist in structuring, negotiating and drafting commercial agreements and schedules relating to standard agreements, technology agreements and related transactions.
- Address all probable risks by seeing to it that they are sufficiently mitigated in the agreements drafted.
- Conduct legal due diligences on transactions.

Accountability: Advisory and opinions
- Ensure technical correctness of agreements drafted by ensuring that the latest legal requirements have been included in the agreement.
- Staying up to date with all relevant laws, case law and regulatory directives and guidance, this is done by doing regular research on legal developments and attending training interventions.
- Ensure that all risks are sufficiently addressed in agreements entered by the Bank, understanding the requirements of business, legal issues and possible business risks and incorporating clauses in the agreements to address such risks and requirements.
- At all times ensure that sufficient legal knowledge has been obtained and updated with latest legal developments to ensure that they are correctly reflected in the agreements drafted.

Accountability: Management of Legal Risks
- Proactive updating of templates and identification of clauses for continuous improvement.
- Ensure effective and appropriate verbal and written communication of the legal policies to internal clients.
- Proactive monitoring of compliance of the legal risk control framework.
- Adhere to Absa frameworks, policies and procedures applicable to the role, demonstrating sound judgement and responsible risk management and when required highlight breaches and request dispensations & waivers on a timely basis. Report all risk events/incidents/issues immediately upon discovery and escalate significant events/incidents/issues using the defined process for the business area.
- Understand why risk events/incidents/issues happened and identify how to prevent them in future - focusing on fixing root causes and taking ownership of identified actions.
- Actively raise the profile of the legal function and improve on Legal Key Risks
- Manage and create awareness by embedding legal policies and control requirements in all areas of the business
- Provide appropriate challenge and equally be robust in the face of challenges
- Build strong risk partnerships with colleagues in other functions (especially key control areas)
- Fully understand the role of legal in AGL and how it interacts with other functions and the business.
- Identify and escalate non legal and legal risk issues
- Contributes to the creation of policies and controls

Accountability: Stakeholder Management
- Build relationships with key senior stakeholders within the legal and business functions across the Bank and become a trusted advisor.
- Timeous, appropriate and collegiate engagement and collaboration with Legal colleagues from other teams, particularly where matters are business facing or are related to another area of expertise (e.g. employment law).
- Timeous and proactive escalation of issues to manager (technical, stakeholder related and where matters have been open for more than 3 months), blocking out contract review time with manager sufficiently in advance so as to avoid urgency and delays.
- Timeous and accurate matters reporting, providing adequate detail and drafted in a manner that can be easily copied into a General Counsel report.
- Explain legal concepts, clauses in agreements and risks to internal clients.
- Provide training that is beneficial / informative to internal clients by way of presentations, such as training on new legislation or recent legal precedents.
- Manage external counsel were applicable.
- Familiarization with the Bank’ internal governance.
- Contribute to industry wide initiative and develop a good network amongst peer group externally.
- Proactively collaborate across different teams and geographies within Legal to break down silos.

Accountability: