Inside
里 supplies the sound - lǐ drifting to lí through tone shift.
里 itself depicts a field (
田) above earth (
土), the seed for 'village, neighbourhood, inner'. Helpfully,
里 was also a classical unit of distance - and
厘 is a tiny unit of measurement (a hundredth, a thousandth). The phonetic carries both reading and a faint measurement flavour.