________________________________________________________________________________ Luke
Tillman | LONGi Solar
Solar supply chains move across jurisdictions that apply different trade rules, labor standards, and enforcement practices. For companies operating at scale, shipments can be delayed at borders, contracts can shift with changing tariffs, and regulators can redefine expectations with little notice. In that environment, legal teams do more than interpret rules. They shape how the business operates within them. At LONGi Solar, Luke Tillman, General Counsel for North America, works at that intersection.
Luke leads legal and trade functions that connect supply chains, contracts, and regulatory obligations across regions. His role carries weight because compliance delays ripple beyond the legal function. They affect delivery schedules, revenue, and relationships with customers and suppliers. That scope reflects the evolution of his position after joining the company.
He joined LONGi to lead global trade, attracted by the scale and complexity of the work.“ The issues that a solar company faces span its entire supply chain,” he notes. As enforcement ramped up across renewable energy markets, trade became central to legal risk.“ The role quickly grew to a point where it became an important compliance issue, then moved to an important legal issue. The transition just made sense,” he reflects. That shift expanded his mandate to include both trade and broader legal oversight.
Luke’ s path to law started early.“ I thought about becoming a lawyer for the first time when I was in elementary school.” He kept his focus on that goal while playing sports. He attended Kent State University, where he played football and prepared for law school. Later, he earned his Juris Doctor from Case Western Reserve University and an LLM in international trade from Georgetown.
He deliberately chose government roles.“ I wanted to work in international trade, a decision I made right after law school,” he remembers. He worked for the US Department of Justice and across agencies like Customs and Border
Protection and the US International Trade Commission, where he leant how regulators think and act. Today, that experience shapes how he builds compliance at LONGi.
“ By most measures, LONGi is the largest solar company in the world,” Luke observes. The company manufactures wafers, cells, and modules, with a footprint spanning China, Southeast Asia, and North America. LONGi controls many stages of production, giving it visibility across inputs and exposing it to different regulatory regimes.“ Having that level of integration allows us to be highly specialized when it comes to dealing with certain markets and regions,” he adds.
Rethinking trade compliance
One of the first tests of Luke’ s approach came through enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The policy triggered shipment detentions across the solar sector, as companies struggled to provide documentation that satisfied regulators. Containers sat at ports for months, disrupting delivery timelines and increasing costs. Luke reviewed the situation from the inside. He analyzed workflows, documentation practices, and how the team worked with regulators. What he found wasn’ t noncompliance- it was confusion. He told his team,“ The good news is your documents actually demonstrate compliance, but the way we’ ve been putting them together and presenting them to the government is confusing.”
He changed how the team worked. They shifted from collecting documentation to auditing it, focusing less on gathering records and more on analyzing them with the regulator’ s perspective in mind. He also reached out to US Customs and Border Protection and asked,“ Will you tell us everything that we’ ve been doing wrong?”
That approach reset the relationship. Instead of putting LONGi at odds with the regulator, he aligned internal processes to match how reviews actually work.“ We needed to prepare materials in a way that made sense internally, knowing they would be reviewed by another team using the same framework,” he remarks.
modern-counsel. com 111