McCarthy Tétrault has expanded its business law group in Toronto with the hiring of a transactional lawyer from Bennett Jones.
Adam Taylor comes to McCarthy’s Toronto office as a partner. Taylor advises public and private companies on financings and M&A and has a strong focus on the mining sector, which is changing rapidly with the increasing role of private equity in deals.
“I’ve got a mining-focused practice. McCarthy really has incredible strength in terms of some of the technical commercial points specific to mining law such as the commercial contracts and other legal work around developing a mining project. That’s quite a specific skill set which is rare to find. For a mining lawyer, like myself, who focuses more on the M&A and capital markets side, it is helpful to match that up with people on the commercial mining side,” Taylor told IFLR1000.
Taylor sees economic trends, globally and in the mining sector specifically, having an impact on companies’ interest in pursuing M&A. Players in the mining sector may increasingly find it practical to pool their resources.
“In the mining space, there has been a bit of a downturn for some time now. Commodity prices and world economic trends have had an impact on that. If you’re a mining company, you might have said historically , ‘I can develop my project on my own, raise capital for it, I don’t need to worry about partnering someone to share the costs.’ But now, people are re-evaluating those kinds of decisions. There may be M&A flowing out of that, where two stand-alone companies decide it may make sense to combine.”