Steve Harmon Joins Elevate as General Counsel

Global law company Elevate announced that Steve Harmon has joined as general counsel.

The company said Harmon currently leads multiple practice areas in the Cisco law department, where he has worked with Cisco’s Chief Legal Officer Mark Chandler for 19 years. He will divide his time going forward, continuing to lead non-Elevate portions of the Legal Operations portfolio at Cisco while serving at Elevate. Harmon is also a co-founder and board member of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) whose broad mission is to promote collaboration among in-house legal operations professionals.

“Steve’s experience will help Elevate scale our own legal infrastructure as we continue to grow quickly,” says Lokendra Tomar, CEO of Elevate. “Having developed a long‑term relationship with Steve as a customer of M&A support and AI development, we saw a unique complementary opportunity to channel Steve’s deep understanding of in-house needs into the services we provide to our customers.”

“Steve has been a tremendous leader at Cisco as we’ve transformed the delivery of legal services and commenced a broader transformation of the company,” says Mark Chandler, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Cisco. “I’m glad to have Steve continue to provide vision and leadership for our internal legal operations while providing the legal services and leadership that Elevate needs to move to the next stage of its growth.”

“I am passionate about helping the legal sector evolve in critical ways,” says Harmon, “I look forward to bringing my experience to bear at Elevate while remaining an active part of the in‑house feedback loop and maintaining my direct ties to one of the most progressive thinking companies in America.”

Harmon assumes the Elevate general counsel role from Nicole Nehama Auerbach, co-founder of ElevateNext, who has served as acting GC for Elevate since June. ElevateNext is a new model law firm closely aligned with Elevate.