It doesn’t take long to discover
Rick Palmore’s roots.
Palmore, 59, has been executive vice president,
general counsel, and chief compliance and risk
management officer of General Mills Inc. since
2008. That post—which carries responsibility
for the packaged-food giant’s worldwide legal
activities, corporate ethics and compliance,
and corporate security—is the culmination of a
professional odyssey that started in Pennsylvania,
near a town represented in Palmore’s office in
Minnesota's Golden Valley by Pittsburgh Pirates
and Pittsburgh Steelers memorabilia. (Asked about
the latter’s recent Super Bowl loss, he replies,
wryly, “It wasn’t a very good game.”)
But perhaps the bigger giveaway about his
geographical origins is his work ethic.
The second-youngest of five kids, Palmore was
raised in a working-class environment in Monroeville,
Pa., just outside of Pittsburgh, that stressed the
importance of education and an honest day’s work.
“I grew up along the Monongahela River where
the Westinghouse Air Brake Company had a
facility,” he recalls. “That’s where my father worked
his whole life. He worked in maintenance and he
was a cook later.”
“My parents were very achievement-oriented,”
he says. “To put it in context, the house I grew up in
was the house my father grew up in—it was owned
by Westinghouse Air Brake. Back in those days, the
companies owned the houses. When the company
got out of real estate, they gave employees the
chance to buy the houses they lived in.”
There was little question that once out of high
school, Palmore would be going on to college—a
seldom-walked path for a member of a working-class
family at that time. Neither of his parents had much
in the way of education, he says, so “they were very
focused on making sure their kids were [educated].”
An excellent high school student, Palmore was
encouraged by a guidance counselor to apply to Yale,
even though, as he says, “none of the [Ivy League
schools] were in my frame of reference.” But Palmore’s
interview session with Yale alumni prompted the school
to pursue him, and he chose to attend, eventually
securing a bachelor’s degree in economics.
The path to law school was paved with similar
thought: It was simply the next logical step for a
bright, ambitious student who knew he had more
challenges ahead. “There were no lawyers in my
family, and I’d never been to a lawyer’s office,”
Palmore says. “The closest concept I had of what a
lawyer did was from Perry Mason.”
A desire to study away from the East Coast led
Palmore to the University of Chicago Law School,
where he earned his J.D. in 1977. With a solid
educational foundation in place, Palmore returned
to Pittsburgh for a three-year stint with what was
then Berkman Ruslander Pohl Lieber & Engel, where
he took on litigation cases.
220
SUPERLAWYERS.COM
AT TORNEYS SELECTED TO SUPER LAW YERS WERE CHOSEN IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROCESS ON PAGE 9.
