Squire Patton Boggs has hired Cameron Ford as an international arbitration partner in Singapore.

Ford joins the firm after nine years as in-house legal counsel at Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. In 2011, he briefly led legal matters for Rio Tinto's Mongolian joint venture copper-gold mining project Oyu Tolgoi in Ulaanbaatar.

Previously, Ford was in Australia and did in-house stints at infrastructure and integrated services provider Downer EDI Ltd. and National Australia Bank Ltd. Before that, he was a barrister practising in commercial disputes, and a disputes partner in Darwin at legacy firm Cridlands Lawyers (now part of HWL Ebsworth).

Ford's appointment follows the hire of Christopher Bloch, who joined the U.S. firm last month as an associate from the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, where he was an associate counsel.

"Singapore is now one of the fastest-growing seats of international arbitration in the world, and Cameron and Christopher are key strategic additions to our global practice," Stephen Anway, who co-chairs Squire's international dispute resolution practice group from New York with George von Mehren in London, said in a statement.

In a report last year by the School of International Arbitration at Queen Mary University of London and the U.S. firm White & Case, Singapore was ranked as the third-most popular arbitration seat globally, after London and Paris – up from fourth in the previous report in 2015. In 2017, a bill permitting third-party funding for arbitration passed in Singapore less than two months after it was introduced, while a similar bill in its regional rival Hong Kong became effective in February of this year, after 19 months.

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