About

Joining Rio Tinto in January 2018 as general counsel – commercial, Peter Hopp brings more than 20 years of global legal experience to the company. In his prior roles, Hopp served as international general counsel with Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge in commodities trading and food processing sectors, and also spent several years in Europe, Africa and China in private practice. ‘From my start in-house in 2001’, he says, ‘I have had the benefit of direct exposure to CEOs and board members. This has fostered my understanding of strategy, as well as our priorities. Second, I was very fortunate of being developed and constantly challenged by my global general counsels. With the right balance of guidance and delegation, I learned fast to be accountable, and to deliver tangible success. A very welcome result of such exposure was the constant benchmarking and improvement of my communication skills’. Hopp has been integral to a number of key projects for Rio Tinto in the year since joining. ‘Immediately upon my start with Rio Tinto, I have embedded each member of the commercial legal team within its specific product group. This has fundamentally changed the way we work, communicate, and understand our client’s needs, and it promoted a much stronger integration of the legal team within commercial’, he says. ‘In addition I have been honoured to lead the reorganisation of all legal services for Rio Tinto’s downstream businesses (such as iron ore, aluminium, copper, diamonds, uranium, energy and minerals, as well as procurement and marine), including the introduction of new technologies to manage workflows smarter and much more efficiently. Since the beginning of 2018, we have drastically reduced our C2C (contact to cash) exposure and cycle times by introducing a totally new set of general conditions, including many risk-opportunity weighed provisions. I look forward to implementing another suite of tech solutions around contract authoring in 2019, eventually leading to smart contracts for the entire commercial business of Rio Tinto’.