Senior Legal Manager – Financial Litigation & Regulatory Disputes

Role Purpose

Key Responsibilities

• Develop litigation strategy from pre-action assessment through judgment, appeal, settlement, and enforcement.
• Lead banking, fintech, commercial, regulatory, and financial crime litigation.
• Manage complex fraud, unauthorized transactions, chargeback, and asset recovery matters.
• Lead responses to injunctions, garnishee orders, subpoenas, freezing orders and preservation orders.
• Review and challenge defective court orders where legally appropriate.
• Represent the company before regulators, including CBN, EFCC, NFIU, FCCPC and law-enforcement agencies.
• Coordinate internal investigations involving fraud, AML, sanctions and financial crime.
• Manage external law firms, litigation budgets and legal strategy across jurisdictions.
• Advise executive management on legal risk, crisis response and sensitive matters.
• Establish litigation governance, reporting, KPIs and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• LL.B and admission to practice in Nigeria. LL.M preferred.
• Minimum 10 years post-qualification experience.
• At least 5 years leading litigation for banks, fintechs or regulated financial institutions.
• Extensive commercial litigation, banking litigation and regulatory enforcement experience.
• Experience drafting pleadings, affidavits, witness statements and legal submissions.
• Strong courtroom strategy, negotiation and advocacy skills.
• Experience managing high-value disputes (preferably NGN 1 billion+).
• Experience supervising external counsel across multiple jurisdictions.

Preferred Experience

• Financial crime and fraud recovery
• Asset tracing and civil recovery
• Cross-border litigation
• International arbitration
• White-collar crime
• Regulatory investigations
• Digital payments and fintech

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic thinking
• Commercial judgement
• Crisis management
• Executive communication
• Stakeholder management
• Decision-making under pressure

KPIs

• Litigation success rate
• Financial recovery value
• Regulatory response timeliness
• Court-order compliance
• Reduction in litigation exposure
• External counsel performance
• Legal budget management

What PalmPay Offers

• Regional leadership exposure across Africa.
• Opportunity to build a best-in-class litigation function.
• Competitive compensation and performance incentives.
• Career progression to Director/Head of Litigation.

Ideal Candidate Profile

We are seeking a commercially minded financial litigation lawyer with deep banking or fintech experience, capable of independently leading complex litigation, regulatory investigations, external counsel and high-profile disputes involving regulators, courts and law-enforcement agencies.