Two decades on Bay Street advising mining companies, royalty and streaming groups, resource financiers and special committees — now practising as a boutique by design, with a global reach by nature.
Rob Mason is the founder and principal of Mason Law, a Toronto-based boutique that acts for mining companies, royalty and streaming groups, resource lenders and boards on the transactions that define the sector: royalty and stream financings, offtakes, M&A and going-private deals, IPOs and RTOs, and equity and debt financings.
Rob founded Mason Law in 2020 after two decades at leading Bay Street firms — most recently as Partner and Head of Mining in Canada at Norton Rose Fulbright, and before that at Stikeman Elliott, Fasken and Gowling WLG. He has worked on close to 500 transactions over his career, including more than 200 led at Mason Law, across 25-plus jurisdictions on five continents.
That experience spans the full life cycle of a resource company — from early-stage option and earn-in agreements through to producing-asset royalty sales and multi-billion-dollar take-overs, including the C$3.9 billion acquisition of Osisko Mining by Yamana Gold and Agnico Eagle and the C$946 million financing package for Stornoway Diamond's Renard project. Recent mandates include royalty and stream transactions for Orion Mine Finance and OR Royalties, secured lending and offtake work for Auramet International, and option agreements for Centerra Gold.
He is regularly retained by special committees of independent directors on take-over bids, related-party transactions and going-private deals, and writes on critical-minerals policy, project finance and board governance in the firm's Insights series.
Every mandate starts with where the deal needs to land — and works backward to the documents, not the other way around.
Advice framed in commercial terms. The legal analysis is in service of the transaction, not a substitute for it.
Royalties, streams and hybrid instruments reward structural thinking. Twenty years of precedents, none of them applied by default.
A boutique means you deal with the lawyer who does the work. Calls returned the same day; turnaround measured in hours, not weeks.
Counsel to special committees on transactions ranging from small-cap public M&A to multi-billion-dollar going-private deals, with a particular focus on independence analysis, process design and the MI 61-101 disclosure record.
Working on a royalty, stream, financing or committee matter? Rob takes the first call personally.