Meet our new Trustee: J. Michael
Parish
Michael has more than 35 years experience as a partner in several large Wall Street law firms. Although the work he has been involved in crosses the range of venture capital, intellectual property and advisory work for major financial institutions, his principal focus has been in the field of corporate and securities law with specialization in finance, mergers & acquisitions, public utility and energy law. He currently serves as the non-executive chairman of the board of Forum Funds, a group of 35 mutual funds headquartered in Portland, Maine managing more than $5 billion in assets. He also served for many years as outside Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) counsel to several large public utility corporations and as counsel to the board of those companies. He has written extensively for business and legal publications on Sarbanes/Oxley, energy deregulation, and corporate governance. Further experience includes securitization of intellectual property assets such as patents, trademarks, record masters and copyrights to facilitate management buy-outs and financings for Bill Blass, Iron Maiden and TV Tunes. Michael has published widely in the area of creative writing including a series of lawyer/client stories in The Green Bag ("An Entertaining Journal of Law") as well as other stories and a number of poems, one of which took first prize in a W. B. Yeats Poetry Society of New York contest. He has been the secretary of his Princeton class for 25 years and writes 23 columns a year for the Princeton Alumni Weekly in that capacity. He has been a resident of Bergen County for three years and lives in Oradell with his wife Ellen, who serves as Director of Performance Improvement and Risk Management at Isabella Geriatric Center in northern Manhattan, a 700-bed not-for-profit nursing home, which is the largest such facility in New York City. His son Billy is the coordinator of Energy Action, a coalition of student environmental groups with over 30,000 members. Billy was featured in Rolling Stone magazine's November 17, 2005 issue as their "#1 Climate Hero of the 21st Century" for his work in organizing environmental activism across the country and overseas. Michael's daughter Maya is a successful Hollywood actress who has had roles on American Dreams and How I Met Your Mother as well as extensive work in commercials. |
On June 1 of this year, Hackensack Riverkeeper welcomed its
newest board member. J. Michael Parish is a cum laude graduate of Princeton
University, where he was a University Scholar; and of Yale Law School, where he
was a National Scholar.