Team size: Ten

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Over the past year, our legal team has been involved in the Company’s most strategic deals and projects, providing legal support throughout their structuring, negotiation, execution, and implementation.

Some of the most significant matters include the expansion of our holdings in strategic markets, such as desalination and rare earths via M&A transactions, as well as substantial investments in our existing mining operations, while also divesting interests in markets that are no longer consistent with our core business. This is in line with the CAP Group’s portfolio strategy, which will enable us to fulfill our Company’s purpose and become leaders in the market of critical materials for decarbonisation.

These initiatives required the negotiation of complex commercial agreements, financing arrangements, regulatory and environmental analysis, and coordination with multiple internal and external teams of professionals. Our legal team has played a key role in ensuring that these deals were executed efficiently while managing legal and regulatory risks.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Over the past year, our legal team has continued investing time in training on the use of AI tools, with a strong focus on practical applications that improve our day-to-day work .

We have implemented in-house AI bots with access to certain internal records, which has significantly streamlined the retrieval of information such as dates of approvals, powers of attorney, attendance records, and other corporate documentation. Instead of manually reviewing large volumes of documents, our team can quickly access the relevant information and then cross-check the results before using them. This has substantially reduced the time spent on routine administrative and information gathering tasks.

We have also developed a dedicated bot that incorporates our compliance policies and internal regulations. It allows collaborators across the company to ask questions about our compliance program, internal policies and procedures, and whether a particular course of action is consistent with our internal standards. This has made our compliance function more accessible and has helped provide quicker guidance to the business while maintaining appropriate oversight.

The impact on our legal team has been substantial. We have been able to increase our in-house output substantially without having to rely on external counsel as much as we did before. This has allowed us to reserve external legal resources for more complex transactions, strategic projects and specialised matters where they add the greatest value.

Generally speaking, AI has made our legal team more agile, more efficient and more cost-effective, allowing our lawyers to focus their time and energy on higher value projects that require legal judgment.