Legal Counsel – Corporate Banking at NCBA Group

Job Purpose Statement

The Legal Counsel is responsible for providing support to the allocated units for corporate banking business for lending both in country and syndicated cross border lending, securities, contracting, contract projects, litigation, recoveries to corporate restructures.

Key Accountabilities (Duties and Responsibilities)

Corporate Litigation & Recoveries Support

For allocated units ensure:

• Ensuring compliance with the policies relating to procedures related to litigation management
• Providing concise, responsive and practical legal solutions to all legal issues on all allocated litigation files. The solutions should be sought through external counsels as well as proper research conducted.
• Ensuring successful negotiation of matters out of court to ensure that the costs to the Bank are minimized by avoiding expensive litigation in conjunction to the business teams on whether the approach is plausible.
• Receiving summons in the proper manner and ensuring that the proper defenses are filed on time. Ensure that the summons received are sent to external advocates.
• Payment of the advocates fees at least within two weeks of receiving an undisputed fee note.
• Ensuring that all reports are provided in time within allowable time frames.
• Attending management meetings on recoveries upon request.
• Keeping abreast with and proactively acting on market developments that may adversely affect the banks success to recover loans.
• Project relevant trends that affect the collectibles in allocated corporate recoveries portfolio and isolate potential problem areas.

General Legal Queries Management

For allocated units ensure:

• Provision of legal advice and support including preparation of Executive summary on all legal queries and Ensure ES is completed within 5 days from the date the issue arose.
• Prepare draft Executive summaries to various legal issues and ensure the drafts are reviewed by Senior Legal counsel and the Head of legal where necessary.
• Carry out research on laws and regulations (both new and old) affecting the bank and advice on the impact of such laws on the business.
• Give guidance on consumer protections as per the consumer protection Act and the Prudential Guidelines.

Contract and Customer Documentation & Corporate Advisory

For allocated units ensure:

• Compliance with policy and procedures related to contracting & customer documentation;
• Providing concise, practical and effective legal opinions on contracting and customer documentation, assist with preparation of Executive Summaries
• Review and drafting of contracts and customer documentation (where necessary engage the services of external counsel
• Successful negotiation and execution of contractual terms for both contracts and customer documentation between the Group and external parties

(Perfection and Review) & Credit Approvals Support (15%)

For allocated units ensure:

• The review of and advice for credit approval support request on corporate securities;
• Discuss and draft the credit approval support advice with the Legal Officer/ Senior Legal Counsel; Customer Experience

Enhance customer experience (25%)

• Compliance of the SLAs between the department and our internal and external customers.

Ideal Job Specifications

Academic:

• Bachelor’s Degree Law (LLB)
• Master of Laws (LLM) (Desired but not necessary)

Professional:

• Admission as an advocate of the High Court of Kenya (minimum 5 - 7 years post admission
• A Masters degree in combination with an aggregate of five to seven (7) years of qualifying work experience may be accepted)

Desired work experience:

• A minimum of 5 - 7 years’ experience legal department of a busy organization, financial institution or law firm