Mining and critical-minerals counsel.

Almost every mispriced legal requisition starts the same way. A company decides it needs a lawyer for its minerals exposure and asks the legal function what grade the role sits at. The function looks along the org chart, finds the commercial counsel who papers supply agreements, and answers with that band plus an adjustment for seniority. The scope document is written afterwards, by somebody else, and it is the scope document that describes the job.

That sequence used to be survivable, because the perimeter of the work stayed stable long enough that last cycle’s grade still described this cycle’s job. It is not stable now. Britain rewrote its own policy inside three months, and Australia legislated a competency that did not exist a year earlier: the Future Made in Australia Act 2024 received Royal Assent on 10 December 2024 and the Future Made in Australia (Production Tax Credits and Other Measures) Act 2025 followed on 14 February 2025, creating a 10 percent offset on critical-minerals processing and refining costs. Eight weeks apart, a tax-incentive compliance file landed on a desk that had never carried one.

The second reason the grade is wrong is that the signal a pay committee watches has moved in the opposite direction to the work. The International Energy Agency’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 records critical-mineral investment falling 9 percent in 2025, battery-metals investment down by more than 20 percent and lithium-company investment cut by roughly 40 percent, with only copper-focused spending up, at 8 percent. Read that and the market is cooling. Read the next line and it inverts: deal value rose 20 percent over the same year, and Bain reported in January 2026 that transactions above $500 million rose about 45 percent. Two years earlier the same survey, reported by Mining Weekly, counted $73.6 billion across 502 deals — so the jump came from bigger and more complex files, not from many more of them. Legal load tracks that number; compensation committees watch the first.

Sartori’s own mandate telemetry shows what that does to a search. Of the 24 in-house searches closed in London over the trailing three years, 7 carried a minerals-supply perimeter, and in 5 of those 7 the company had already been trying to fill the role for more than six months before it changed the specification. The band was rarely the first thing to move: the scope was rewritten, the title upgraded, the reporting line raised, and only on the second cycle did the number change. Counter-offer incidence across the London in-house book runs at 32 percent, which is the other half of the story — the people who can do this work are already doing it somewhere, and their employers know what they are worth even where the market has published nothing.

A general counsel at a London-listed diversified producer put the mechanism plainly to us: the company had priced the role against its supply-contracts lawyer, then found at second interview that the shortlist it wanted had spent two years on a convention renegotiation and an arbitration, work that grade had never been asked to cover. The seat was not expensive. It was mis-described, and the price followed the description.

Sartori has worked the London market for more than ten years, for mining groups, commodity trading houses and downstream manufacturers securing supply. Over the trailing three years we closed 24 in-house searches here, at a 93 percent completion rate, on a typical timeline of four to seven months and a median of 13 working days between offer and signature. We map roughly 30,000 lawyers in London, and the share of that map carrying a permitting file, a convention renegotiation and an offtake dispute in the same career is small enough that a shortlist is assembled by name rather than by search string. The people exist. They are not findable by title.

The finding from the same research that cuts against us: of the 96 mining, trading and manufacturing respondents in the London cohort over that 24-month window, 41 said the seat was eventually filled by promoting a generalist already on the payroll and buying external counsel around them. That was the most common resolution the cohort reported, and it is an outcome no search firm is paid for. It is often the right one, too — a company with one asset, no imminent transaction and a stable jurisdiction needs a named owner and a retained relationship, not a dedicated hire. Our telemetry also starts only when a company calls us, so for the 5 of 7 minerals mandates already open for six months we see nothing of those months except what the client tells us afterwards.

Two composites show how the pricing question resolves. A London-listed diversified producer with one operating asset, in a jurisdiction that had rewritten its mining code, came to us with a band graded against its supply-contracts lawyer. We split the brief rather than raising the band: one in-house hire owning permitting, offtake and disclosure, and a retained arbitration relationship outside the payroll. Closed in five months, with a package the company could defend internally because it was priced against a narrower and better-described job.

In the second, a mid-size trading house lost a cobalt delivery window to a government export decision and opened a head-of-legal search the following month at the group standard band. The preferred candidate was counter-offered by their employer at the final stage — the 32 percent incidence arriving in a single file. The search closed at six months on the second preference, and the company’s own retrospective put the loss down to the four weeks spent arguing the band internally at the start. The argument about the number happens either before the search or during it, and only one of those is free.

Below major-producer scale, the route is usually one in-house seat plus a retained relationship for the dispute-facing end, which is credentialed differently: at the investment-treaty and stabilization-clause level the teams doing this work are built around former senior public office rather than post-qualification years. Our in-house counsel recruiting work starts from that split, and our search methodology sets out how the mandate telemetry is recorded.