Inspired by her father, an anti-trust lawyer, Andrea Halverson Harper was encouraged to follow in his footsteps. She first affiliated in the field as an accountant manager for Carmichael Lynch from 1995 until 1997 before joining JuryScope as a consultant for two years. She subsequently became an associate with Vinson and Elkins, where she held the role of an associate from 2002 until 2011, upon which she became counsel. Three years later, Ms. Harper became the assistant general counsel for Pepco Holdings, an Exelon Company, where she remains today.
In pursuit of her legal ambitions, Ms. Harper earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1995. Following this accomplishment, she received a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2002. During her studies in law school, she was honored to serve as a business editor of the Journal of Law and Politics at the university. With a plethora of knowledge at her disposal, Ms. Harper authored “Reducing the Biasing Effects of Judges’ Nonverbal Behavior with Simplified Jury Instructions,” which was featured in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1997.
Due to her outstanding work in the legal field, Ms. Harper has been honored numerous times, earning the Kirkland House Master’s Prize, the Gordon Allport Award for Excellence in Psychology and two Ford Foundation grants supporting her thesis research from Harvard College in 1995. During the same year, she received the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize from Harvard University. In recent years, she won the Vinson and Elkins Pro Bono Award for obtaining grant of asylum for a persecuted humanitarian from Darfur in 2012, and was chosen to participate in Exelon’s Power to Lead Program in 2018. Looking ahead, Ms. Harper aims to continue rising through the ranks at Exelon.