Senior Legal Advisor: Investments (3 Year Fixed Term Contract)

Job Description
To proactively provide legal advice and support to clients on the financing activities of DBSA, ensuring that all actions, initiatives, and investments are legally sound and protect the investment portfolio. Mitigate legal risks and prevent adverse reputational or other negative consequences for DBSA. Provide guidance and leadership to junior legal advisors, fostering their development and ensuring consistency in legal counsel across the organisation.
Key Responsibilities
Key Performance Areas:
Legal Advisory Functions:

Collaborate with core project teams to support Investment Officers in structuring diverse investment projects, with a strong focus on project finance and equity transactions.
Conduct thorough legal due diligence investigations on investment projects.
Perform advanced research on a broad range of legal issues related to various investment initiatives and commercial transactions.
Advise and contribute to the drafting and review of appraisal reports, ensuring sound legal inputs.
Serve and participate in various credit committees of the DBSA, offering legal guidance.
Prepare, review, and negotiate comprehensive term sheets for investment projects, with a focus on project finance transactions.
Lead negotiations with clients, co-funders, and stakeholders to ensure favourable legal outcomes.
Draft, vet, and review complex legal documents and agreements, ensuring clarity and compliance.
Provide substantial legal advice, support, and opinions to various corporate support units within the DBSA.
Monitor and maintain compliance with relevant legislation, policies, and regulations in all legal matters.
Work closely with the compliance team to ensure robust regulatory frameworks are in place.
Keep abreast with legal developments and update colleagues and management on relevant changes.
Identify matters requiring specialist legal input and instruct and liaise with appropriate external counsel.
Collaborate with external attorneys to prepare comprehensive briefs and manage transactions with external counterparts.
Manage all aspects of corporate litigation, ensuring the organisation's legal interests are protected throughout the process.
Manage the legal budget for the appointment of an external legal service provider and ensure work is done cost-effectively.
Support the execution and implementation of investment projects from a legal and security perspective.
Provide general legal support to the operational and corporate units of the DBSA, ensuring alignment with legal requirements.

Key Measurements of Outputs:

Time taken to prepare and or review contracts, agreements and legal opinions.
Quality and accuracy of agreements, opinions and solutions provided.
Effective management of legal claims and litigation risks.
Management of total case/agreement/opinion/other legal costs.
No litigation due to contractual errors and or omissions.
Effective monitoring of the contracts and agreements.
Clean audit.

Key Internal Liaison Relationships:

DBSA committees and unit managers
Other Professionals in the Legal Unit
DBSA Credit Committees
Investment Officers
Technical Specialist

Key External Liaison Relationships:

External Customers and DBSA Suppliers
External Counsel

Expertise & Technical Competencies
Qualifications and Experience:
Minimum Requirements:

A Bachelor of Laws degree (LLB) or Legal postgraduate qualification.
Admitted Attorney/Advocate of the High Court of South Africa.
A minimum of 5 years' experience in Project/Corporate/Structured Finance transactions.
A minimum of 5 years post admission experience in a commercial/finance/banking or corporate law environment gained at a commercial banking, specialist law firm/ corporate or similar institution.

Desirable Requirements:

Private-public partnership experience.
Municipal finance experience.
Public Enterprises Regulatory Framework.
Postgraduate qualification in Business, Development Finance or Banking.

Technical Competencies:
Written communication:

Understands that different writing styles are required for different documents or audiences.
Writes effective correspondence, prepares questions and reports, statements of circumstance and briefing notes.
Reviews others' documents for clarity and impact.
Has a solid mastery of writing principles such as grammar, sentence construction etc.

Presentation skills:

Can reinforce key presentation points with examples.
Is able to translate technical terminology into language understandable to the audience.
Has insight into the audience's behavior and motivation and responds appropriately and professionally, adapting communication style as appropriate.

Reporting:

Designs/customizes reports to meet user needs.
Prepares complex or tailored reports, gathers information from a variety of sources, analyses and includes in a report.
Keeps standard reports under review and proposes improvements to meet user needs.

Legal Knowledge:

Extensive knowledge and understanding of the principles of DBSA.
Wide-ranging knowledge of industry best practice, and keeps abreast of, interprets and informs on developments in the area of new laws and regulations relevant to DBSA.

Legal Policy Knowledge:

Ability to represent DBSA in the court of law when required.
Ability to draft non-standard legal documents per procedures.
Ability to draft more sensitive policy and legal procedures to be followed by stakeholders of DBSA, and review and refine in response to inputs from relevant stakeholders, for approval.
Ability to understand legal rights and responsibilities and the possession of authority to make legal decisions.
Protects the organisation's legal rights, utilizing a broad knowledge base of all major legal disciplines.

Presentation Skills:

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.).
Has knowledge of various feedback mechanisms to check levels of audience understanding.

Business Acumen:

Takes actions to fit business strategy.
Assesses and links short-term tasks in the context of long-term business strategies or perspectives.
Reviews own actions against the organisation's strategic plan; includes the big picture when considering possible opportunities or projects or thinks about long-term applications of current activities.
Anticipates possible responses to different initiatives.
Understands the projected direction of the industry and how changes might impact the organisation.

Negotiations:

Has an appreciation of cultural sensitivities and differences.
Effectively employs a variety of advanced behavioural/interpersonal competencies to control the negotiation situation.
Is able to take the lead in a variety of sensitive negotiation situations requiring high levels of tact and diplomacy.
Is able to place a discrete negotiation situation within the context of a broader long-term relationship and is not threatened by conceding ground to protect the longer-term interests of DBSA.

Required Personal Attributes
Behavioural Competencies:
Customer Service Orientation:

Tries to understand the underlying needs of customers and matches these needs to available or customized products and services.
Adapts processes and procedures to meet ongoing customer needs.
Utilises the feedback received by customers, in order to develop new and/or improve existing services/products that relate to their ongoing needs.
Thinks of new ways to align DBSA's offerings with future customer needs.

Self-awareness and Self Control:

Withholds effects of strong emotions in difficult situations.
Keeps functioning or responds constructively despite stress.
May apply special techniques or plan ahead of time to manage emotions or stress.

Strategic and Innovative Thinking:

Experiments with new approaches, tests scenarios, questions assumptions and challenges conventional thinking.
Creates new concepts that are not obvious to others, leveraging internal and external sources of information, to build incremental revenue and growth opportunities.

Driving delivery of results:

Sets challenging goals that will have a significant impact on the business or support the organisational strategy.
Commits significant resources and/or time to ensure that challenging goals are achieved, while also taking action to mitigate risk.

Teamwork & Cooperation:

Acts to promote a friendly climate and good morale and resolves conflicts.
Creates opportunities for cross-functional working.
Encourages others to network outside of their own team/department and learn from their experience.

Decisiveness:

Acts promptly to address urgent needs, taking quickly those decisions which need to be taken.
Assesses available information to reach a clear view of key options and selects the best option at the time.
Thinks on their feet when necessary.
Changes his/her perception, ideas or alters normal procedures to fit a specific situation to get a job done and/or meet company goals.

Impact and Influence:

Includes careful preparation of data for presentation.
Makes two or more different arguments or points in a presentation or a discussion.

Achievement Orientation:

Focuses on new or more effective ways of improving own work and meeting targets.
Focuses on raising quality, customer satisfaction and revenues.
Makes specific changes to systems and processes in order to improve efficiency and quality.
Formulates own objectives and action plans in order to achieve a measurable improvement in the future.


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