The Chief Legal Officer (CLO) / General Counsel is the senior-most legal executive responsible for overseeing the legal affairs of the organization. This role involves providing strategic legal guidance to the Board of Directors and executive leadership team, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations, managing legal risks, and protecting the organization's interests. The CLO leads the legal department, oversees corporate governance, and works closely with external legal partners to support the organization's business objectives

• Identify and manage legal risks across the Region, and develop and deploy effective legal risk management strategies and controls.
• Act as a trusted and confidential adviser to the MEA management and advise on legal risk and other strategic issues that have a legal, reputational or conduct impact for the Bank in the Region or to the broader franchise.
• Provide leadership and oversight of the Legal team, in conjunction with the relevant lead lawyers for the specific product/ coverage areas.
• Ensure the effectiveness of operational frameworks with Compliance, Risk and Legal coverage teams for the escalation of non-contentious matters with significant legal risk to enable appropriate input and oversight by the General Counsel for the International business and key business stakeholders.
• Ensure the effective operation of governance, assurance and reporting practices across the Legal team, including provision of periodic management information.
• Provide strategic oversight of legal issues relating to the business, including subject matter expert advice in relation to thematic reviews, forthcoming industry issues, best practice sharing and standardised procedures and governance matters.
• Work with the European General Counsel on continued assessment of the effectiveness of the Legal target operating model as referred to the business.
• Oversee any external legal advice sought on matters relating to business, to ensure quality, consistency and cost-effectiveness, managing the balance between in-sourced and outsourced advice, driving high quality, cost effective and speedy, sustainable resolution of legal issues.
• Prescribe and lead the development of such processes, policies and procedures as may be required to mitigate legal risk for business, ensuring consistency and compatibility with other Principal Risk policies and practices already in play.
• Support the preparation and delivery of training programmes within the Legal team, the wider Legal function and, where necessary, senior stakeholders.

• Experience of leading teams containing lawyers with technical expertise across a broad range of products, entities and, if possible, jurisdictions.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with a track record of building strong and trusting relationships across a range of stakeholders, and ability to operate comfortably and effectively with senior levels of management.
• Ability to prioritise and delegate effectively, thinking strategically about where to focus energy in order to give the best possible service to stakeholders while being personally responsible for the delivery of effective legal services to the business.
• Very strong communication skills, with an ability to assimilate and distil complex issues rapidly and accurately to enable swift and effective decision making.