About

‘What I enjoy the most about my role is that I get to be a part of a team,’ says 49ers’ vice president of legal and government affairs Hannah Gordon. ‘Everyone in the business has one goal: win the Super Bowl. The goal doesn’t change no matter what your method of contribution; whether by playing, coaching, selling tickets, processing payroll, cleaning the building, or reviewing contracts’. As a woman in the world of major league sport, Hannah Gordon has drawn recognition not only from her peers, but from national and international press. ‘Ms. Gordon is in a unique position in the sports industry, owing not only to her judgment and instinct as an expert counsel, but also to her status as a trailblazing female mentor in a male-dominated industry,’ says Harry O’Brien of San Francisco firm Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass. Gordon herself is particularly proud of her work on the club’s new stadium. ‘The highlight of my in-house career to date was the ribbon-cutting at Levi’s Stadium,’ she says. ‘It is rare that you have the opportunity to work on a project where your product is as tangible as a beautiful and imposing physical structure that houses 68,500 people’. Gordon has had a longstanding passion for the sports world, having previously worked for the NFL’s Management Council, and as a law clerk for the Oakland Raiders. She is a member of the NFL committee that administers the NFL Player Tuition Assistance Plan, and is on Santa Clara University Institute for Sports Law’s Ethics Advisory Board.