Travis Torrence is the great-great-grandson of slaves who worked on plantations along the River Road in Louisiana — a swath of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — just footsteps away from a Shell USA refinery in Convent and just miles away from Shell’s petrochemical plant in Norco. He is the great-grandson of Mississippi sharecroppers. His dad was a truck driver and his mother was a public high school teacher. Three months ago, London-based energy giant Shell named Torrence as its head of legal for its U.S. operations and associate general counsel over global litigation — the first Black person to hold the position.
“My story and my family’s history are not lost on me,” Torrence told The Texas Lawbook in an interview. In this story, Torrence talks family, his days at Shell and the attributes of the outside counsel he seeks to hire.