SPEAKER
Lawrence has four decades of experience in environmental and sustainability management, verification/auditing, and responsible sourcing.
He began his career as a legal assistant in the Environmental Practice of Vinson & Elkins working for a partner who is nationally recognized and an adjunct professor of environmental law at the University of Texas Law School.
He moved into technical environmental consulting at the height of environmental regulatory development, working across a range of disciplines.
He was an in-house environmental audit manager with Georgia-Pacific, then a publicly traded Fortune 150 manufacturer.
At Georgia-Pacific, he designed and implemented a comprehensive redesign of the company’s internal environmental audit and corrective action program which was later approved without modification by EPA and Department of Justice as part of a $120 million Clean Air Act settlement.
He was also one of the company’s primary experts on waste management regulations and worked on the initial environmental performance metrics.
Lawrence joined Marsh USA and helped create the Global Environmental Risk Consulting Practice, shifting his focus from compliance to a broader vision of environmental impacts to business and risk management, working with clients to reduce their environmental risk profile by adapting traditional risk management processes and tools.
He founded subsidiary Elm Sustainability Partners and became an internationally recognized expert in conflict minerals, responsible minerals supply chain due diligence and associated audit programs/practices.
He was the only non-financial auditor selected by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to participate as an expert panelist on the conflict minerals rule and provided guidance on non-financial auditing to US Departments of State and Commerce.
Lawrence remains one of only a handful of auditors to have conducted Independent Private Sector Audits (IPSAs) of Conflict Minerals Reports submitted to the SEC under Dodd Frank Section 1502.
During his time at the Responsible Business Alliance/Responsible Minerals Initiative, he led an unprecedented period of due diligence standards development, including spearheading an expansion into ESG standards for responsible mineral supply chains. Lawrence is the author of Killing Sustainability (2018, 2022).
