Legal Advisor: Investments

Job Description

The purpose of the role is to provide legal advice and support on the financing activities of DBSA, ensuring that all actions, initiatives, and investments are legally sound and protect the investment portfolio.

Key Responsibilities

KEY PERFORMANCE AREAS

1. Legal Advisory Functions

• Provide legal guidance to investment teams in structuring various investment projects, with a primary focus on project finance transactions, as an active member of core project teams.
• Conduct comprehensive legal due diligence investigations to identify and mitigate potential risks.
• Perform advanced research on various legal issues related to various investment projects.
• Provide legal advice and contribute to the drafting and finalisation of appraisal reports.
• Serve as a participant in various credit committees of the DBSA, offering legal insights and recommendations.
• Prepare, review, or negotiate detailed term sheets for all investment projects, with an emphasis on project finance transactions.
• Negotiate with clients, co-funders, and other stakeholders to secure favourable legal and contractual terms.
• Draft, vet, and review a wide range of complex legal documents and agreements to ensure accuracy and alignment with legal standards.
• Provide robust legal advice, support, and formal opinions to various corporate support units within the DBSA.
• Ensure compliance with relevant legislation, policies, and regulations in all legal and investment activities.
• Monitor legal developments and update colleagues and management on relevant changes and implications.
• Liaise with external counsel and prepare comprehensive briefs for counsel as required.
• Provide legal support in executing and implementing various investment projects, ensuring legal and security aspects are thoroughly addressed.
• Provide general legal support to operational and corporate units within the Bank.

Key Measurements of Outputs:
1. Time taken to prepare and or review contracts, agreements and legal opinions.
2. Quality and accuracy of agreements, opinions and solutions provided.
3. Effective management of legal claims and litigation risks.
4. Management of total case / agreement / opinion / other legal costs.
5. No litigation due to contractual errors and or omissions.
6. Effective monitoring of the contracts and agreements.
7. Clean audit.

KEY INTERNAL LIAISON RELATIONSHIPS

1. Other Professionals in the Legal Unit
2. DBSA Credit Committees

3. Investment Officers
4. Technical Specialists

KEY EXTERNAL LIAISON RELATIONSHIPS

1. External Customers and DBSA Suppliers

2. External Counsel

Expertise & Technical Competencies

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

Minimum Requirements:
1. A Bachelor of Laws degree (LLB) or Legal postgraduate qualification.
2. An Admitted Attorney of the High Court of South Africa.
3. A minimum of 3 years post admission experience.

4. A minimum of 4 years’ experience in a commercial/finance/banking or corporate law environment gained at a commercial banking, specialist law firm/ corporate or similar institution.

Desirable Requirements:
1. Private-public partnership experience.
2. Legal postgraduate qualification.

TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES:

a) Written communication

• Understands that different writing styles are required for different documents or audiences.
• Write 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.

b) 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 behaviour and motivation and responds appropriately and professionally, adapting communication style as appropriate.

c) Reporting

• Designs / customises 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.

d) 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.

e) 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, utilising a broad knowledge base of all major legal disciplines.

f) 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. .

g) 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.

h) 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

a) 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 on-going customer needs.
• Utilises the feedback received by customers, in order to develop new and/or improve existing services/ products that relate to their on-going needs.
• Thinks of new ways to align DBSA’s offerings with future customer needs.

b) 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.

c) 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.

d) 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.

e) 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.

f) 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.

g) Impact and Influence

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

h) 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.