Nicole Harris
Nicole Harris is an accomplished attorney and trusted business partner with over 20 years of experience providing focused advice, directing commercial legal matters, and devising practical solutions to challenging problems. She is a balanced strategist, connector, and maximizer who brings clarity and insight to decision making for complicated business imperatives and unites cross-functional groups toward common goals.
Nicole also has a proven ability to: communicate challenging legal issues to operations team in professional and reassuring manner, achieve a balance of sound legal counsel and practical business advice, and solve business and operational challenges while mitigating significant company risks.
In her current role as the General Counsel in California of Quanta Services, Nicole provides broad-based legal advice and support to business partners and lawyers to optimize business operations within California, including working with customers at three major investor-owned gas and electric utilities in California. She constructively engages stakeholders with risk-informed insights and frameworks to add value to the business. Highlighting a few of Nicole’s responsibilities demonstrates her ability to focus on risk allocation by aligning approaches across subsidiaries and customers within the state. She understands the importance of discussing key issues with the General Counsel or Head of Compliance. Nicole is able to synthesize large amounts of data, analyze options to solve problems, and use interpersonal skills to drive agreement on moving forward. Her weekly meetings provide direction to out of state subsidiary general counsel who manage consulting, electric, engineering, and telecom operations in California. Nicole also supports the M&A Director and the M&A Counsel on major acquisitions involving crossover issues, as well as engage and work with outside counsel experts on regulatory, real property, environmental, and labor topics to provide value to the overall matter. Nicole coordinates with the subsidiary HR directors on California employment law and Covid regulations affecting the workforce to efficiently disseminate materials and promote compliance.
Prior to joining Quanta Services, Nicole served as Senior Counsel to Pacific Gas and Electric for 18 years. She has a multi-faceted role on the transactional legal team managing 200+ contracts annually.
Nicole also served as the legal partner supporting PG&E’s lines of business on procurement contracts for billions of dollars of annual spend on goods (OEM and VAR), services, consulting, IT (hardware and software), and infrastructure buildouts from both legal and business perspectives. She also advised Sourcing regarding compliance with corporate governance policies. Nicole as adept at working with cross functional teams including attorneys, business heads, engineers, PMs, and SMEs. She was able to build strong relationships while drafting custom contracts for complex projects and creating standardized templates for standardized work on contracts valued as high as $1B. During Nicole’s tenure at PG&E she was tapped to support new complex business initiatives, including development and launch of the EV Charge Network $130 million program to install Level 2 EV infrastructure across Northern and Central CA.