About

Over the course of almost a decade with the Fortune top-200 ranked Louis Dreyfus Company, Massimiliano Talli has risen through the ranks and found success in a number of roles. Beginning as a senior M&A counsel for Europe and the Black Sea in 2010, he progressed to the role of chief legal officer role for Asia in early 2013, and in 2017 was appointed a permanent member of the senior legal team managing the global legal function of the company. His improvements to the Asian legal team over recent months have been many and varied, highlighting his leadership and organisational skills alongside his legal ability. ‘As well as reducing the number of firms used by establishing long term and strong partner relationships’, he explains, ‘we have succeeded in increasing the seniority of the Asia legal team by attracting people with strong entrepreneurial acumen on top of pure legal skills. As well as this, we have made progress in transforming the perception of the legal team into a business partner and less of a pure cost centre and have built a collective global legal team culture; the lawyers feel part of the global legal function’. When discussing the reasons for his success, Talli believes that a firm academic grounding was consolidated by high-quality, on-the-job experience while operating with international law firms in the area of corporate and M&A work. ‘This combination’, he says, ‘proved to be very effective as it gave me a competitive advantage on understanding the dynamics of the deals from a larger perspective that the pure legal angle’. This experience meant that joining the commodity world in 2010 was ‘an almost natural follow-up’, which was the foundation block of his subsequent success.