Rich Allen

Richard K. Allen is a civil engineer and lawyer by training and has been deeply involved in the design and construction industry for over 45 years. During that time, he has held a series of board and executive leadership roles encompassing a broad range of responsibilities. He has extensive design, consulting, and construction expertise as well as large company management, merger and acquisition, dispute resolution and legal expertise.

Since 2018, he has served on the Board of Directors of Gilbane Construction, Inc., a 150-year-old $6B privately held family-owned construction and real estate development firm. From 2018 through 2022, he served as the outside advisor to the Board of Directors of GZA GeoEnvironmental, Inc., a 660-person professional engineering and consulting firm.

He is the former chief operating officer for Stantec Inc.’s global operations — now a $4 billion, 22,000-employee international design and consulting professional services firm. Mr. Allen’s leadership at Stantec focused on the aggressive growth and profitable operations of Stantec’s global-wide locations. Before serving as Stantec’s COO, Mr. Allen was their east regional operating leader responsible for that unit’s financial performance while actively involved in the company’s U.S. operations acquisition and integration programs, strategic planning, budgeting and project contract and dispute resolution activities. He retired from Stantec in 2016. Mr. Allen was the past president and CEO of Dufresne-Henry, Inc. a New England-, New York- and Florida-based consulting engineering firm. He led Dufresne Henry through its ownership transition and later that company’s sale to Stantec in 2006.

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An attorney and a construction dispute arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association, Mr. Allen’s was also a former general partner at Gadsby Hannah, LLP (now McCarter English LLP) serving as chairperson of the design and construction law practice with a concentration on litigation, arbitration and dispute resolution as well as transactional advisory services to the design and construction industry. Prior to his legal career, Mr. Allen worked for consulting engineering firms as a project engineer and manager on numerous public work-related projects throughout New England and the Pacific Northwest.

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Mr. Allen is a registered professional engineer in several states in the U.S. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1976 and his Master of Science degree in civil engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980 after completing graduate research at McGill University in Montreal. He also has a 1985 law degree from the University of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce Law Center and is a member of the bar in several states and has appeared before state, federal and appellate courts.

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Rich lives just south of Boston with his wife. He has 3 now grown children and 5 grandchildren living in the Boston, New York City and Los Angeles regions.