Episode 9-The Environmental Entrepreneur

In this episode, I speak with Charlie Lord, an attorney who has spent his entire career trying to solve environmental problems. Since graduating law school, Charlie has worked in the non-profit sector and more recently, in the the for profit space. While he is trained as a lawyer, Charlie has spent most of his career tackling environmental problems by creating organizations and companies that are working to address issues like environmental justice, greenhouse gases and a host of other environmental problems. His legal training helps him to achieve his objectives; but since clerking for the Appeals Court in DC, he has had an alternative legal career in the truest sense of the word. When I decided to go to law school in the 1980s, I was very idealistic and wanted to use my law degree to have a positive impact on the world. As an undergraduate, I was involved in a lot of environmental and other progressive causes and I enrolled in law school at Northeastern with the intention of being involved as a community activist. While I still try to make a positive contribution to the legal profession, the idealism of my younger days took a different turn. But Charlie Lord is someone who has held true to his values. After law school, Charlie founded two social ventures including Alternatives for Community and Environment  which focuses on combating environmental blight in the inner city. After leaving ACE, he co-founded and ran the Urban Ecology Institute which worked on educating inner city youth about environmental issues. For the past 10 years, Charlie has been working in the for profit sector to address environmental problems. Today, his is a principal of Renew Energy Partners  a company which invests in energy retrofits in commercial buildings to reduce energy costs and climate emissions. In this episode, Charlie offers some great career advice for lawyers interested in doing environmental work.