Lisa M. Palumbo has served public and private companies as a C-suite executive and board member in the engineering & construction, defense, natural resources and technology sectors. She currently serves on the board of directors of Rayonier Advanced Materials (NYSE:RYAM), a specialty chemicals company, and is a member of its Audit and Nominating & Governance Committees.
Ms Palumbo most recently served as the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Parsons Brinckerhoff Group Inc., a global professional engineering services firm with 14,500 employees on 6 continents and 2014 revenues of $2.5 billion. She directed worldwide legal, risk management, compliance, and environmental, health & safety and oversaw business development and marketing of the firm’s proprietary safety management system. She served on PB’s CEO Committee, and was a member of its board of directors. In addition to guiding the firm through transformative and complex change in control transactions, she successfully reduced professional liability claims exposure year over year during her tenure and led development and implementation of a global risk management information system. In January 2015, she retired from Parsons Brinckerhoff after its acquisition by WSP Global.
Before joining Parsons Brinckerhoff, Ms Palumbo served as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of EDO Corporation, a NYSE‐listed developer of advanced, highly engineered systems and products and professional services for defense, intelligence, and commercial markets. Ms. Palumbo guided EDO and its board of directors through significant governance and regulatory changes and developed its corporate compliance program, negotiating and successfully implementing a Consent Agreement with the U.S. State Department covering international defense technology export compliance. She also served on the board of directors of EDO (UK) Ltd., its UK subsidiary. As a member of EDO’s executive team, she evaluated, negotiated and closed nine strategic acquisitions in five years, during which revenue grew at a compound annual growth rate of almost 16 percent through its own acquisition by ITT in December 2007.
From 1997 to 2001, Ms Palumbo served as Vice President and General Counsel of Rayonier, Inc., a NYSE-listed global supplier of timber, wood products and performance fibers. Ms. Palumbo provided leadership and oversight on issues relating to sustainable forestry, environmental regulation affecting pulp mill operations, forest management regulatory action in New Zealand, and led the legal team in the successful acquisition in an auction process of over one million acres of timberland in the southeast U.S. In 2014, Rayonier spun off Rayonier Advanced Materials Inc. (RYAM), its chemical cellulose business, and Ms Palumbo was elected to RYAM’s board of directors.
Prior to her service at Rayonier, Ms Palumbo spent ten years at Avnet Inc., a NYSE-listed, Fortune 150 international supplier of electronics and information systems, where she served in successively more responsible positions in its legal department, culminating in Assistant General Counsel, and negotiated and closed numerous dispositions and acquisitions as the firm transformed from a conglomerate to a world leader in electronics distribution and supply chain management. She joined Avnet from private practice where she concentrated in commercial litigation.
Ms Palumbo received her BA from Rutgers University summa cum laude, with college honors, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Her JD degree is from Rutgers Law School-Newark, and she is admitted to the bars of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.