Elizabeth Harris, ’86

Senior Corporate Counsel for Safeway Inc.

Flexibility also marked the career of Elizabeth Harris ’86. Harris is the senior corporate counsel for Safeway Inc., overseeing labor and employment matters involving 31,000 employees throughout Northern California, Nevada, and Hawaii.

She advises Safeway on employment law, but as a political science major, she once eyed a career in the realm where laws originate—politics. After college she worked as a paralegal, and seven years flew by. She then felt too old for law school. Now it was her mother who pointed the way, because around the same time the mother of five grown children enrolled in Santa Clara’s law school. Seeing her success, Harris finally applied, too. “My mother was an inspiration to me,” she says.

After working as a litigator for several years at an Oakland firm, Harris was intrigued when a former colleague urged her to consider a position with a leading supermarket chain. She signed on with Safeway in 1996, and remains there, taking pride in her proactive efforts to prevent litigation through training and communication.

Career choices, she says, have something in common with a corporate counsel’s work. “Sometimes you have to go with your gut. You can give sound advice without having to open a book and research it.” Santa Clara helped her develop that knack through its diverse law program, she says, and especially by facilitating her externship with California Supreme Court Justice Allen Broussard, an experience that helps her to this day.