Closing Date 2024/10/21
Reference Number DBS241010-1
Job Grade 18
Job Type Classification Permanent
Location - Town / City Midrand
Location - Province Gauteng
Location - Country South Africa
JOB DESCRIPTION
1. To lead and oversee the provision of Corporate Legal Services and advice to the DBSA on a range of corporate legal matters, including labour matters.
2. Assess the potential legal risks and implications of corporate strategies, business initiatives and projects.
3. The role provides strategic direction and advisory support to legal advisors, ensuring their development and the consistency of legal guidance across the organisation.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Key Performance Areas:
Strategic Outputs
1. Collaborate with the General Counsel to set the strategic direction for the provision of corporate legal services and related strategies across the organisation.
2. Contribute to the development and implementation of the organisation's corporate legal strategy and execution plan in alignment with the overall business objectives and strategy.
3. Cascade the execution plan to ensure direct reports manage their portfolios in line with the division's vision, strategy, and goals.
Legal Function
1. Oversee the provision of comprehensive legal services and advice to DBSA’s corporate units, including Finance,Treasury, Human Capital, and Corporate Services.
2. Oversee compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and internal policies and keep abreast of changes in legislation and ensure that all operations and decisions align with the regulatory requirements.
3. Communicate the risks and legal issues associated with a broad range of commercial transactions and operational matters specific to DBSA’s corporate divisions.
4. Draft, vet and review various corporate legal contracts, including service agreements, consultancy, software and hardware support, leases, and grant agreements.
5. Provide legal advice on procurement, supply chain management, and tender processes.
6. Participate in DBSA’s procurement committee, offering legal guidance.
7. Lead negotiations with service providers and consultants to secure favourable terms for DBSA.
8. Manage corporate and employment litigation, including contractual disputes and CCMA referrals.
9. Conduct advanced legal research into corporate legal matters, providing in-depth legal opinion and legal implications.
10. Identify issues requiring specialist legal input, liaise with external attorneys and prepare comprehensive briefs as needed.
11. Manage the legal budget for external legal service providers, ensuring cost-effectiveness.
12. Deliver general legal support to DBSA’s operational and corporate units as needed.
13. Provide leadership, guidance, and support to the legal team, ensuring adherence to required service levels.
14. Lead and direct various ad hoc legal investigations within DBSA.
15. Build positive working relationships and create cross-functional synergies
16. Guide and manage direct reports to ensure the effective execution of unit strategies and portfolio management.
17. Monitor and manage the performance of external attorneys involved in DBSA projects or legal matters.
Stakeholder Engagement
1. Build positive working relationships and create cross-functional synergies
2. Represent the legal function at relevant internal DBSA committees.
3. Provide legal reports on the progress of key matters to the Executive Committee, business units and various committees.
4. Manage and build relationships with external attorneys, and various key stakeholders in the legal fraternity.
People Management
1. Provide direction and management to the direct reports to enable the execution of strategy and manage their portfolios effectively.
2. Manage and evaluate the performance of the direct reports against set targets, KPI’s and metrics.
3. Define, cascade and monitor business and people performance objectives of direct reports.
4. Attract, retain, and develop high-calibre talent. Develop and maintain sufficient depth in all critical functions, minimising "key-man" risk.
5. Optimise skills usage within the unit.
6. Accountable for performance management of all direct reports, managing their performance in relation to quality standards and agreed benchmarks and objectives, focusing on all aspects of sound people management.
7. Develop the skills and abilities of all team members, with the result that they perform to their highest potential and optimize their current and future job performance.
8. Proactively support the bank's diversity strategies and initiatives.
9. Contribute to building synergies and cooperation across functions in the DBSA.
10. Promote DBSA values and a culture of High Performance within the Unit.
Key Measurements of Outputs:
1. Quality of legal agreements and opinions.
2. Legal compliance-based target for the year on regulatory fines, penalties and contraventions to law.
3. Litigation management: win/loss ratio in legal disputes or litigations.
4. Quality and accuracy of agreements, opinions and solutions provided.
5. Legal spend on cases – track on a budget or year-on-year comparison.
6. Effective management of legal claims and litigation risks.
7. Management of total case/agreement/opinion / other legal costs.
8. Clean audit.
|
EXPERTISE & TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES
QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:
Minimum Requirements:
1. A Bachelor of Laws degree (LLB) or legal postgraduate qualification.
2. Admitted Attorney of the High Court of South Africa.
3. A minimum of 8-10 years’ post-qualification experience in Corporate Litigation/ Commercial/Finance/Banking or Corporate Law.
4. The experience must include a minimum of 5 years’ experience in a management position within a legal environment.
5. Knowledge and understanding of all legislation relevant to the banking environment (i.e., Banks Act, NCA, FICA, FAIS, Reserve Bank Act, Competition Act, Magistrates Court Act, High Court Act).
6. Ability to conduct research and interpret case law.
7. Expert knowledge of risk and financial management principles, philosophy and methodologies to lead the most complex legal cases, projects/ assignments and agreements in the banking environment.
8. Ability to interact professionally and confidently at all levels of management and clients and other internal and external stakeholders.
Desirable Requirements:
1. Post-graduate qualification in Banking Law/ Project Finance.
2. Employment Law and Labour Relations
Key Internal Liasion Relationships:
1. Executive Management and Senior Management
2. Audit & Risk Committees
3. All DBSA Divisions
4. Overall DBSA management
Key External Liasion Relationships:
1. External Customers and DBSA Suppliers
2. Executives of other commercial banks
3. External Counsel
Technical Competencies:
Legal Knowledge
1. In-depth knowledge and understanding of the principles and investigation in their specialised areas such as contracts and agreement, litigation and other general legal advice and ability to give clear and accurate advice to DBSA.
2. Remains up-to-date with new laws, regulations and compliance with South African laws affecting the business, and regularly interprets and advises senior Stakeholders on these.
3. Identifies risk in commercial transactions and suggests risk mitigation methods where applicable.
4. Advises senior management on the sequencing and pacing of policy recommendations in terms of legal implications.
Legal Policy and Knowledge
1. Directs and oversees the setting of organisational legal strategies, policies and guidelines of the most complex and important cases/legal objectives.
2. Extensive Knowledge of all relevant legislation, local Law and policy.
3. Extensive knowledge of topics such as procurement laws, claims, agreements, and patents laws, intellectual property financial laws, labour laws, environmental laws, trade and economics laws etc.
4. Knowledge and ability to enforce conditions and provisions of contracts, grants, agreements and leases.
5. Understands global market conditions and trends to meet the needs of different stakeholders and to advance the liberalisation of DBSA.
6. Awareness of all local regional and global legal developments.
Strategic Planning
1. Ability to analyse business trends, implications and options to devise holistic and long-term strategic plans as well as execute the required change is essential to meet an organisations objectives and future goals
2. Establishes challenging, attainable goals and objectives based on a customer focus perspective.
3. Looks to the future with a broad perspective.
4. Ensures performances measures are in place to monitor progress and assess accomplishments and achievement of strategic goals and objectives.
5. Develops initiatives to achieve goals and objectives.
6. Articulates the vision and plans to others.
Policies & Procedures
1. Is able to evaluate existing policies and procedures in terms of their suitability in light of the broader business agenda.
2. Has sufficient sector expertise to be able to scan the market to obtain examples of best practice in own area of specialism.
3. Can develop new policies and procedures where required, aligning them with DBSA strategy and appropriate legislation.
4. Is able to present recommendations to senior management for approval in a concise manner.
Commercial Business Acumen
1. Is capable of analysing commercial situations, developing options and making recommendations.
2. Monitors the economic environment and continuously seeks opportunities for economic policy and legislation improvement to ensure ease of doing business in South Africa.
3. Actively monitors the South African business environment to ensure promotion of fair competition, the protection of consumer interests, effective trade and investment, etc…
4. Understands South African business community issues/challenges and can build win-win relationships with them.
5. Envisions, creates and facilitates connections to develop and enhance partnerships, alliances and networks that advance shared interests.
Risk Identification & Assessment skills
1. Advises on applicable aspects of risk identification and assessment.
Planning & Organising
1. Coaches’ others on advanced planning and organising skills.
2. Plays a role in transferring advanced planning and organising skills and knowledge to others.
3. Identifies and acts on opportunities to partner with other units in the department to achieve desired results.
4. Develops partnership agreements that ensure win-win outcomes for all parties. Develops integrated plans for the work unit and others that interfaces with the function’s budget.
Reporting & Communication
1. Designs, reviews and improves reporting processes and provides guidance.
2. Leads production of complex environment reports, takes an editorial role, determines content and level of detail, and ensures consistent messaging and branding.
3. Is relied on by others to help them write complex technical and non-technical documents and briefs.
4. Is able to determine which aspects of this knowledge area need to be transferred to others in order to achieve organisational goals.
5. Coaches others and transfers communication skills and knowledge to others.
6. Able to communicate complex problems or concepts, by making them simple and understandable for others.
7. Adapts language to the level of the audience in order to ensure that the message has a positive impact and is interesting to the audience.
8. Is articulate, demonstrates a wide range of vocabulary, and is confident when talking to large/high level audiences.
Presentation Skills
1. Knows how to deliver arguments persuasively by employing a range of advanced presentation techniques (e.g., the appropriate use of body language, how to close a presentation so that the audience continues to think about the subject matter etc.).
2. Has knowledge of various feedback mechanisms to check levels of audience understanding.
Solution Focus
1. Identifies broad, highly complex problems based on a multitude of factors, many of which are complex and sweeping in nature, difficult to define and often contradictory.
2. Creates procedures to articulate the nature of problems and to identify and weigh alternate solutions.
3. Evaluates the effectiveness of solutions using approaches tailored to the situation.
REQUIRED PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES
Leadership/Behavioural Competencies:
Leading & Empowering Others
1. Identifies long-term goals for the team and communicates them to team members, ensuring their buy-in.
2. Sets a good example by personally exercising desired behaviour, acts on values and beliefs.
3. Communicates a vision for the team and future success that inspires team members.
4. After assessing others’ competence, one delegates full authority and responsibility to others to do a task in their own way.
5. Ensures that competent employees are given opportunities to further their careers.
Leading & Managing Change
1. Anticipates the need for change when not obvious and influences others to gain support. Builds sustainable business and organisational capacity to embrace and thrive on change.
2. Re-engineers and aligns structures, processes and practices to support and sustain the desired change.
Strategic & Innovative Thinking
1. Understands connections and trade-offs of strategic choices to evaluate which ideas are practical and possible by considering business and/or scientific implications.
2. Develops innovative business and/or customer solutions that shape industry practices.
Teamwork & Cooperation
1. Acts to promote a friendly climate and good morale and resolves conflicts.
2. Creates opportunities for cross-functional working.
3. Encourages others to network outside of their own team/department and learn from their experience.
Developing Others
1. Gives specific positive or mixed feedback for developmental purposes.
2. Gives negative feedback in behavioural rather than personal terms.
3. Reassures and/or expresses positive expectations for future performance when giving corrective feedback.
4. Gives individualised suggestions to individuals for their improvement.
Driving delivery of results
1. Identifies and implements a business opportunity that will have a long-term impact on the business (which may include the organisation’s reputation or brand image). Monitors progress and adapts the plan if necessary to ensure optimal benefit to the business.
2. Makes decisions, sets priorities, or chooses goals on the basis of inputs and outputs makes explicit considerations of potential profit, return on investment, or cost benefit analysis.
3. Based on the cost-benefit analysis, makes decisions of entrepreneurial risk nature.
Decisiveness (High Performance, Service Orientation)
1. Makes timely decisions about complex issues even when some information is missing.
2. Makes decisions and stands by them even when they are controversial or unpopular. Grasps critical business opportunities when they arise by making timely decisions
Risk Identification & Assessment skills
1. Advises on applicable aspects of risk identification and assessment.
Planning & Organising
1. Coaches’ others on advanced planning and organising skills.
2. Plays a role in transferring advanced planning and organising skills and knowledge to others.
3. Identifies and acts on opportunities to partner with other units in the department to achieve desired results.
4. Develops partnership agreements that ensure win-win outcomes for all parties. Develops integrated plans for the work unit and others that interfaces with the function’s budget.
Reporting & Communication
1. Designs, reviews and improves reporting processes and provides guidance.
2. Leads production of complex environment reports, takes an editorial role, determines content and level of detail, and ensures consistent messaging and branding.
3. Is relied on by others to help them write complex technical and non-technical documents and briefs.
4. Is able to determine which aspects of this knowledge area need to be transferred to others in order to achieve organisational goals.
Coaches others and transfers communication skills and knowledge to others.
5. Able to communicate complex problems or concepts, by making them simple and understandable for others.
6. Adapts language to the level of the audience in order to ensure that the message has a positive impact and is interesting to the audience.
7. Is articulate, demonstrates a wide range of vocabulary, and is confident when talking to large/high level audiences.
Presentation Skills
1. Knows how to deliver arguments persuasively by employing a range of advanced presentation techniques (e.g., the appropriate use of body language, how to close a presentation so that the audience continues to think about the subject matter etc.).
2. Has knowledge of various feedback mechanisms to check levels of audience understanding.
Solution Focus
1. Identifies broad, highly complex problems based on a multitude of factors, many of which are complex and sweeping in nature, difficult to define and often contradictory.
2. Creates procedures to articulate the nature of problems and to identify and weigh alternate solutions.
3. Evaluates the effectiveness of solutions using approaches tailored to the situation.
|
English 
FRENCH
