Vice President, Legal Counsel

Do you want your voice heard and your actions to count?

Discover your opportunity with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the world’s leading financial groups. Across the globe, we’re 150,000 colleagues, striving to make a difference for every client, organization, and community we serve. We stand for our values, building long-term relationships, serving society, and fostering shared and sustainable growth for a better world.

With a vision to be the world’s most trusted financial group, it’s part of our culture to put people first, listen to new and diverse ideas and collaborate toward greater innovation, speed and agility. This means investing in talent, technologies, and tools that empower you to own your career.

Join MUFG, where being inspired is expected and making a meaningful impact is rewarded.

The Legal department provides legal services to and manages the legal risk for MUFG Bank and MUFG Securities (EMEA) and the MUSHD international business (collectively the “Firm”).

Members of Legal are dual-hatted across MUFG Bank and MUFG Securities. Dual-hat employees will be expected to be entity neutral across all responsibilities to ensure that services are provided to both entities effective and without favour or detriment to the other entity.

The Legal Department in EMEA works on a jurisdiction agnostic delivery model requiring its lawyers to be able to deliver legal services to business teams across multiple locations in EMEA and being able to understand different legal systems and approaches. This model also has flexibility to allow lawyers to gain experience across multiple business and product lines.

NUMBER OF DIRECT REPORTS

None.

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE ROLE 

We have an exciting opportunity for a legal counsel to join MUFG EMEA Legal Department as Legal Counsel in the Investigations, Litigation and Employment Team, based in London Ropemaker. This is a challenging role with a varied workload often entailing handling of highly sensitive employment related advice, employment litigation, internal and/or regulatory investigations as well as commercial disputes across EMEA. The successful candidate will deal day to day with colleagues in MUFG’s other control functions (in particular Compliance, Human Resources, Internal Audit and Risk) and will likely gain exposure to senior members of MUFG’s management team, both regionally and globally. The role will broaden and deepen the employee`s experience and knowledge of banking and financial services matters generally and of legal and regulatory systems across a range of EMEA jurisdictions as well as, potentially, those of Japan and the United States and the other regions in which MUFG operates globally.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

In this role, the successful candidate will be providing services which cover MUFG’s banking arm and securities business under a dual-hat arrangement. Under this arrangement, the employee will act and make decisions on behalf of both the bank and the securities business, subject to the same remit and level of authority, and irrespective of the entity which employs them.

Key responsibilities will be to:

• Provide clear, commercially focused employment law advice on the full spectrum of HR and employee relations issues, including disciplinary matters, performance management, grievances, whistleblowing, discrimination, dismissals, and workplace investigations.
• Advise on employment law risks arising from business decisions, policy changes, restructuring, and workforce strategy.
• Support senior stakeholders in navigating complex, sensitive, and high‑risk matters, ensuring alignment with legal requirements and MUFG’s risk appetite.
• Manage the conduct of regulatory and legal proceedings, criminal, civil and employment disputes, to include the selection and instruction of local external counsel.
• Providing MUFG colleagues from around the globe with local assistance throughout EMEA in connection with cross-border litigation and/or with requests for information and documents received from regulatory authorities in other regions.
• Manage internal investigations and inquiries into regulatory and/or ethical/conduct issues in connection with EMEA businesses. This will include leading or supporting other functions (e.g. Compliance or Risk) with scoping investigations, planning and conducting witness interviews and drafting written reports.
• Produce verbal and/or written reports in relation to such investigations for the Co-General Counsel of EMEA and other members of the Legal Management Committee.
• Work with Compliance and other functions in relation to any regulatory risk and advising in relation to communications with the regulator.
• Proactively provide training and develop best practices and precedents within the Investigations, Litigation and Employment team, including supporting with the adoption and roll out of AI tools.
• Working with the Corporate Communications team in relation to any related media coverage.
• Assisting in maintaining a litigation reports and in the preparation of bespoke, periodic internal reports for submission to senior executive management.
• Work closely with the wider EMEA and International legal teams to serve business seamlessly as One MUFG.
• Manage the engagement of law firms and legal spend efficiently.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Functional / Technical Competencies:

• Qualified solicitor in England and Wales or another jurisdiction in Continental Europe or New York.
• Strong legal experience working either in private practice at a major law firm or in-house with another significant financial institution, sponsor or asset management firm.
• Demonstrable experience advising on the full spectrum of HR and employee relations issues. Experience of managing or advising on matters outside of the UK is desirable.
• Demonstratable experience handling complex investigations, regulatory‑linked employment issues, and senior executive matters.
• Demonstrable experience in managing litigation, preferably both in the High Court as well as Employment Tribunal

PERSONAL REQUIREMENTS

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Excellent organizational skills and ability to manage multiple matters at once, follow through and meet deadlines as well as to prioritise work effectively.
• Excellent judgement, with ability to balance legal risk and commercial reality.
• A proactive, motivated approach and strong problem solving skills.
• Resilient, adaptable and with a creative and innovative approach to work.
• Excellent attention to detail and accuracy
• A calm approach, with the ability to perform well in a pressurised environment

We are open to considering flexible working requests in line with organisational requirements.

MUFG is committed to embracing diversity and building an inclusive culture where all employees are valued, respected and their opinions count. We support the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion in recruitment and employment, and oppose all forms of discrimination on the grounds of age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy and maternity, race, gender reassignment, religion or belief and marriage or civil partnership.

We make our recruitment decisions in a non-discriminatory manner in accordance with our commitment to identifying the right skills for the right role and our obligations under the law.