Laura Hills is a founding partner of Hills Stern & Morley LLP.  She began her emerging markets work in the early days of independent power project financing, representing Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) on the first such project financed by OPIC in Latin America.  Since then, she has worked on a variety of generation projects from the large multi-creditor, PPA-backed utility projects to smaller remote mini-grid projects, as well as projects deploying distributed generation. 

Prior to founding Hills Stern & Morley, Ms. Hills spent ten years at OPIC, including as Associate General Counsel for Finance where she served as chief counsel to the Agency for all matters involving the finance program.  During that period, she acted both as OPIC’s lead counsel on a wide range of projects, including major infrastructure, and she supervised line attorneys in connection with a portfolio of project-finance transactions in excess of $2 billion.  Transactions included the repowering and expansion of a 980 megawatt cogeneration power generation facility in Colombia, the expansion of a 235 megawatt power generation facility in Guatemala, and the operation and development of a 14 megawatt run-of-river hydroelectric generation facility in Guatemala. 

Following her tenure at OPIC, Ms. Hills sought to create a law firm for investors looking to enter or expand in those markets supported by development finance institutions and help them efficiently access those bilateral and multilateral resources created to support their investment.  In the years since the Firm’s founding, Ms. Hills has continued to work on projects throughout the developing world and in emerging commercial markets.  Her project finance work includes representation of:  a developer of distributed renewable generation for deployment in East Africa; U.S. Export Import Bank on solar power generation plants in India; a lender to a geothermal power generation facility in the Caribbean; a hotel developer in the Middle East; and a multilateral development agency in the insurance of a toll road investment in Central America, among others. 

Ms. Hills is a member of the District of Columbia bar.  She received a B.A. in political science and Spanish from Stanford University and a joint JD/MA from Stanford Law School.  She was the Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Journal of International Law.  She has held an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center (2003-2009) where she taught International Project Finance. Since 2010, Ms. Hills has been included in “Best Lawyers in America” for her work in project finance.