"I don't see the point," says James Jordan, general counsel – Europe at English China Clays, when asked for an interview. "We have been taken over by a French company and I will be leaving soon."
A personal tragedy, yes. But the takeover of his company was, indeed, the point. The mining sector – 'extractive minerals' as the London Stock Exchange calls it – is going through a profound global consolidation, with far-reaching implications for the UK-based lawyers working for mining companies.
English China Clays is just the tip of the iceberg. The company mines kaolin – a type of clay used to whiten paper, ceramics and other products, most of it from 14 pits on 25 square miles of otherwise barren land around St Austell, Cornwall. It was taken over by Imetal SA, which has similar but cheaper mines in Brazil, for £756m in April.
As mining deals go, this was typical. As with other minerals, there is an international glut of kaolin. And like many other companies in the 'extractive minerals' sector, English China Clays was complacent, recording little or no growth for years.
The big players in the field do not have that problem. Ben Keisler, Anglo American's executive vice president and general counsel, has been busy meeting the legal needs created by his company's acquisitive programme.
"We have had more than 30 transactions over the last year," he says. "Hopefully there will be more and bigger deals in the next few years."
Internationally, mining law involves a wide range of difficult issues, from determining who owns mineral rights on tribal lands through employment and environmental compliance to complex joint venture agreements. But in this capital-hungry field the biggest issue, particularly for British-based lawyers, is corporate finance.
Although Britons have been digging wealth out of the ground since before the birth of Christ – first for tin and salt and later iron and coal – relatively little is mined from these islands today. Even the once mighty coal mining industry is in terminal decline and the last tin mine closed earlier this year. But the sector still plays an important role in the economy. As a significant number of the world's mines were excavated in whole or part with British money, profits from those ventures add to the country's invisibles.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, British explorers and entrepreneurs sought mineral wealth throughout the empire and beyond. The most famous finds were, of course, gold, with rushes taking prospectors from the Klondike to the Transvaal.
The companies set up to mine these finds, and those of other minerals, raised the bulk of their capital in London, traded much of their output here, and settled most of their disputes in English courts. For the same reasons, some of their corporate descendants still have listings and offices here, even though their products may never physically land on Britain's shores.
But the City has not always capitalised on its historic advantages. In recent years, mining companies have been looking elsewhere for their finance, and therefore their legal services. New York has always been a threat, and for the last few years Toronto made advances, until it was tarnished last year by the Bre-X scandal, when the massive gold discovery of a tiny exploration company was found to have been salted with gold from another source to make it appear to be more valuable than it really was.
This trend has at last been reversed with a host of foreign mining companies – including Billiton, Lonmin and Antofagasta – setting up shop in London. Together with South African giant Anglo American – the world's largest precious metals mining group – they helped to treble the sector's market capitalisation to more than £20bn, or about 2% of the total British market, according to the brokerage William de Broe.
Geography has undoubtedly helped. Africa is one of the richest mining areas in the world. The fact that most of it is in a time zone just one hour away from Britain's makes London a more attractive location than North American centres for financial and legal services.
Other miners, particularly from South Africa, where the industry's international ambitions were hobbled for decades by apartheid, are expected to follow in the footsteps of Anglo American. As a result of this wave of new listings, institutional investors are pricking up their ears.
An influx of new capital could not come at a better time for the industry. Commodity prices, including minerals, have been at record lows, forcing companies to restructure and tighten their operations. As the economy recovers, goes the argument, prices and profitability will improve. This optimism helped Billiton and Rio Tinto almost double their share prices in less than a year.
Low mineral prices are also driving mergers and acquisitions. Companies with healthy war chests, despite the lull, are eager to go raiding to create economies of scale, while their weaker rivals have been turned into potential targets. That in turn is creating work for lawyers.
Anglo American's arrival in London and its consolidation with Minorco, its Luxembourg-based affiliate, is a case in point. Even before the move was finalised on 24 May it announced a £37m bid for Reunion Mining, which has a zinc mine in Namibia.
The move to London is still generating legal documents, according to Keisler. "I have been working on the logistics of integrating the companies and getting the listing," he says. "We had to navigate the various listing rules here and in Johannesburg, where we are also listed."
Anglo American, Keisler says, is "a very robust and financially strong vehicle". The company is 46% owned by the Oppenheimer family and their diamond empire, De Beers. After just two weeks of trading in London its shares were expected to shoot straight into the top half of the Ftse 100 this week, causing a brief liquidity crunch as fund managers rush to rebalance their portfolios.
The company's £11bn market capitalisation puts it just ahead of Rio Tinto (£10.8bn) and represents more than 40% of the exchange's mining sector. Analysts are forecasting earnings growth of more than 50% during the next three years.
And that will mean lots of work for Keisler. As general counsel, he says, his job is twofold: "One [part] is really as a counsellor to the company on legal issues generally, which can be a very diverse assignment. The second is trying to make sure that the various operations get the legal services they need."
Anglo American has a diversified legal department. Keisler shares his company-wide responsibilities with Peter Arthur in South Africa, but the company also has legal teams in the countries where it operates to handle local issues. "A lot of the interesting work in mining is on the development side," he says. "We are looking right now at a project in Zambia, and I personally worked on a large coal project in Colombia." The company also has a separate environmental law office.
Keisler has been with Anglo American for 15 years, and has been in London for two. The company doesn't have a panel per se, but uses different preferred law firms in different countries. In the UK it has been working closely with Linklaters.
While many other large mining companies take a similar approach, some firms with a centralised management structure maintain a unified legal office. Others, such as Lonmin, a descendant of the African corporate empire forged by the late Tiny Rowland, have none at all, relying on outside legal advice.
Mining companies may be merging and consolidating, but there is no sign that the structures used by their legal departments will be converging.