The Real Lawyer: Caren Khoo (Part 1)

In this episode, Caren Khoo, VP & Deputy General Counsel at Verizon, discusses her path from industrial engineering to corporate legal leadership. She shares insights about transitioning from IP litigation at firms like WilmerHale to her current in-house role overseeing AI governance and leading a 40-person legal team. Caren reflects on how diverse professional experiences, including early management roles, shaped her approach to legal strategy and team leadership.

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05.026)

Welcome to the Real Lawyer podcast, where we get real about life, working in law, and everything in between. I'm your host, Joy Sophia Hsu. And this is our last interview of our first season. And we have a very special guest with us today, Ms. Karen Koo. Karen serves as vice president and deputy general counsel with the communications giant Verizon.

Prior to joining Verizon, Karen was an IP litigator at Fitzpatrick Challa as well as Wilmer Hale. With this background in IP, Karen has taken on various senior roles at Verizon, leading legal teams, focusing on areas such as AI, data governance, product development, technology innovation, and more.

Speaker 1 (01:02.156)

Welcome to The Real Lawyer, Karen.

Thanks, Joyce. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm so excited to have you on our show. So you and I met as summer associates at Fitzpatrick Challa some 25 years ago. We've become such good friends over the years. At the same time, we've also always been so busy with our careers and lives. So it's extra nice to be able to sit down like this and chat. So Karen, why don't you...

Start from the beginning and tell us about where you grew up and what led you to law school.

Speaker 2 (01:47.666)

I grew up in New Jersey. I was born and raised in New Jersey. My parents are both ethnically Chinese, but immigrated here for school in the sixties. And they're from different places. They, my mother grew up in Taiwan and my dad grew up in Singapore. They met at a Christmas party in New Jersey and the rest is history.

So I think sometimes that I have a lot of traditional values that come from having parents who share some historical Chinese ethnic and cultural traditions, but grew up very differently, eating very different foods from each other, different lifestyles, coming to study different things. And then the majority of my culture is North Jersey.

And what would you characterize North Jersey culture as?

Uh, let's see, I love a chicken parm, probably is one big thing. I think that one of the things about North Jersey, New York City, this whole area that is so special is that a lot of my friends growing up were like me. They were first or second generation, third at the most. Um, and usually there was somebody first generation on one of their parents' sides. So growing up in a,

city, a town that had a lot of diversity in terms of people coming to the United States and wanting the same things for their kids, great education, having very similar family values. I think that really speaks to New Jersey and how I grew up.

Speaker 1 (03:38.648)

So you grew up in Northern Jersey and did you go into college with kind of law school in the back of your mind as kind of the long-term plan?

I didn't. I always thought I would end up in business. My dream was always to go get my MBA. I had two dreams when I was younger. One was to live and work in Manhattan because growing up, my parents would take us into Chinatown every weekend after weekend Chinese school to go grocery shopping and have dinner. And I so many great memories of

going to city with my parents or we'd go in with friends to watch at Christmas to like watch the the Rockettes at Radio City and then see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and the the windows at Saks and at the time Lord and Taylor Macy's right so yeah I had so many great memories in New York that was one of the dreams that I had and my other dream was to go to UPenn for college which I never did

I love Ben Franklin for many reasons. And, you know, I would say one dream I achieved and one dream is a dream deferred. So I didn't go to school with the expectation of going to law school. I went to college with the thought that I would get whatever degree I would get and then go on for my MBA.

What did you end up studying in college?

Speaker 2 (05:19.038)

I ended up studying industrial engineering in college. So I was an industrial systems engineer. went to Rutgers, which was a New Jersey school. So I'm very Jersey. And I started in engineering because at the time I could take classes at Rutgers College in the honors program as electives. If I, if I was in the honors college for engineering.

So to keep my options open, I chose engineering, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. And I think that was, maybe this has been a theme in how I've approached my life is to, since I don't really know what I want to do, to make choices to keep my options open.

Yeah, that's a good approach. Unlike you, I actually desperately wanted to go to law school, but I thought since I had immigrated to the US when I was a teenager, I didn't think that my English skills were going to be good enough to help me succeed in law school. So that's how I then opted for an engineering major as well.

that I studied chemical engineering. Well, I actually started out as an electrical engineering major, but it was just too hard. was just, I was miserable. came home crying during Thanksgiving of my freshman year. And then I was just like, I just can't do it.

Thanks.

Speaker 2 (07:03.0)

I love that we have this in common. Yeah.

I still stuck with engineering. I just switched to something that was a little bit more interesting. But again, it was also like, okay, yeah, what can I study to build up some skillset to keep my options open?

didn't realize that we had the electrical drop into a different engineering path in common. When I started, since I didn't really know what I wanted to do, you take the introductory class and you pick the one that you want. And I came home and I said to my dad, I want to be an industrial systems engineer. It's so interesting. You do process optimization and there's human factors and robotics. And he said, nope.

Industrial engineering is imaginary engineering because my dad is an electrical engineer and my mom is a chemical engineer and He said no you're gonna do electrical and Again, since I never planned to go to engineering school in the first place. I thought alright, he knows what he's talking about. I'll do that

It's like he was a double E snob.

Speaker 2 (08:17.87)

Like dad has his master's in electrical engineering. And I, I did not do well. I made it through first year with all of the general weed out classes barely. And then my first semester of my sophomore year, I did super poorly in my major classes for electrical engineering. that, when I got my grades, I knew that there was no way that I could finish a four year degree.

in electrical engineering. And so I went to go talk to the dean and I said, what can we do here? Clearly electrical is not working out for me. And he said, you you could always drop out of engineering altogether, but if you stay in engineering, you can pick any of these other engineering other than electrical or chemical and still graduate in four years. And I'll make you a deal. If you

work hard and do well in, and you stay in engineering in a different discipline, then I'll take the bad grades out of your GPA. They'll still be on your transcript. I'll take them out of your GPA and you know, that will be better for you. So I switched into industrial systems engineering, just like I wanted to in the first place. And I slowly built

up in the last year I made Dean's List both semesters so was very of that but by then the damage was done like the first half of college my GPA was not great so.

just a smile and air, right? And then, and he took these grades out of your GPA eventually,

Speaker 2 (10:00.494)

He did, he did. And they were still in my transcript. But again, because I just barely made it through freshman year with a lot of these, um, lot of the weed out classes and some other classes that, you know, I, I really didn't have the grades to go into, um, a great MBA school or frankly, even graduate school for engineering, which I didn't, I didn't really consider. Yeah, I see. But I was always good at reading and writing.

And I had enough classes in English and literature to have an English minor. But I thought I'll apply to law school because my mom said I had to have at least a master's degree because she and my dad both had master's degrees. My dream of going to Wharton

for business school wasn't going to come true right away given my grades, so I had to give it a little bit of time with work. Engineering didn't seem like the best path either. And so that's what I did. I applied to law school.

I didn't have a lot of expectations and I at the same time applied for any job that looked interesting to me on the career resources, you know, platform that they had. wasn't, I don't think it was computerized at the time. think you had to haul in and listen to the choices that I applied for any job that sounded interesting to me. And I got a bunch of interviews and I ended up accepting a job offer at a company that

makes children's and adults vaccines, like a major pharmaceutical company. And I thought, that sounds like a great job. Maybe I'll do that for a while because I had spent every summer in college working for a pharmaceutical company doing either. And true data entry for clinical trials or medical writing. And they always thought I'd end up in pharma.

Speaker 2 (12:10.476)

So I went to that job and I deferred law school for a year.

I see. So you got some real world experience in between college and law school.

They did. had an amazing job coming out of college. And I'm so glad they took a chance on me because I was the youngest. I was a production supervisor. And what production supervisors do is manage a production line. And at the time I was managing a production line for filling and packaging of vaccines. it was, there were 75 people on the production line.

all at least 15, 20 years older than I was. I was the youngest of all the supervisors by at least 10 years, one of the only women. And it was such a learning job because here I am, fresh college graduate, and here are people who have worked in these jobs for so long. And what right do I have to come in to be their manager? So I felt very much like

How do I come in, establish rapport, learn what the job is and develop a team culture? Maybe I wasn't thinking about those words at the time with team culture, but it was something that I thought about a lot. How do I learn and then develop a relationship where I am the manager and have that responsibility for making sure that the line is operating and producing in the way that it

Speaker 2 (13:47.234)

that the goals are set.

Well, so you've actually, I didn't know you during these years, but it just shows me how it's just in your nature to be so thoughtful. And you have those, these natural people skills, natural leadership skills.

You know, it was a big year. was, I think coming out of college, you think that, you you know something, right? Especially out of engineering, you think you have a practice, a skill, and you're going to use that and apply that in your job. But I think what I've learned is every job is you do so much you're learning on the job.

I so appreciate your compliments, but I think that at the time my mindset was more around survival than, you know, anything more lofty than that. Just coming in and trying to get more comfortable and feeling like you could be yourself. Um, and I really did have that in the job in that first job because nobody's putting it in the front. We're all trying to do, you know, just trying to, you know, make sure that

everything's filled correctly in the syringes, in the vials, everything's packaged correctly. They were following the SOPs, they were following all the good manufacturing practices, things that you learn on the job because it's not something that you necessarily learn in college. And then I remember I loved the job so much that I was thinking maybe I won't go to law school. And my mom pulled me aside and said,

Speaker 2 (15:36.864)

you need to go back to law school full time. Because if you don't go back to school now, while you're still young with no real obligations, I still lived at home at the time, you're never going to go back. And I think she was right. So I did decide to go to law school. But I spent a little over a year in that job. And I feel like it has given me so many benefits that I didn't know.

that I would be using now 25 years later, 30 years later in my career.

So you went to law school, you were already armed with a college degree in industrial engineering and a year of very interesting management experience. Then how did you find law school?

Speaker 2 (16:35.136)

I loved law school. I went to Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, which is now part of the University of New Hampshire.

So they rebranded themselves.

They were, yes, I think they became part of the University of New Hampshire university system.

When I went, it was still private. So every, I've only gone to public schools my whole life. if you count the fact that the private law school I to became public. So, I really loved law school because I was good at it. Finally, for once I was doing the, what I felt like I was doing school for myself. In law school, things finally started to click. I.

And we're really good at reading comprehension and it wasn't difficult to understand what the key point was. And then having training us as an engineer was very helpful when you're parsing language and case studies, right? When contracts, they talk about the contract and the difference between and and or, or when you're drafting claims and you're

Speaker 2 (17:56.908)

debating the difference between the and a, right? Words are tools that, you know, to a lawyer, just as guess, technology is our tools to engineers.

Yeah, I definitely also thought that my training as an engineer really helped with, with law school, just the analytical skills always came in handy, whether it was in law school or later when I was practicing. So yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (18:30.606)

I totally agree. Yeah.

I think when you were at Franklin Peers, if I remember correctly, they were a specialty law school, right? They really focused on intellectual property. And in fact, I think they were number one in the country for intellectual property.

Yes, at the time, um, I didn't want to waste my technical degree and I didn't really know what lawyers did and I don't have any lawyers in my family to talk to about this. Um, so I decided I'll go to a school that seems to value at least the degree that I have to go into a type of law that would be able to use that technology degree.

Um, but what I found was that engineering is so good as a discipline because it teaches you how to solve problems. It teaches you how to teach yourself and to think about how to analyze things and then get to a solution. And law school is super similar, um, analytically to solving problems as an engineer. I really enjoyed going back to law school with such a high number of technically trained.

students because probably it was just like going back to engineering school 25 % women everybody with you know either engineering degrees or graduate science degrees and it was you felt like you were among people who are like you who had chosen to go into law after having tried something else

Speaker 1 (20:19.798)

Yeah, that's interesting. Cause as I listen to you, you really, you know, enjoy being a problem solver and

them.

Speaker 2 (20:28.803)

Really?

Speaker 1 (20:35.454)

And, know, we'll get to this later because then it all makes sense to me that you would really thrive in your current role as in-house counsel at a large corporation. Cause I'm sure there's a lot of problem solving going on versus being a litigator. And I've never been a litigator. So, I'm only speaking from an outsider's point of view, but it seems like litigation is less about

problem solving and more about winging and being adversarial, but we could talk more about that later on. So it sounds like law school was very enjoyable. And then how did you end up at your first job out of law school?

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:24.686)

So this takes me back to my dream of always working and living in Manhattan. And I went to New Hampshire for law school because I wanted to be sure that I wanted to come back to the New York, New Jersey area after law school and practice there and kind of settle my life there. So I did and I made that discovery. In fact, yes, I did want to come back to New York City. And at the time,

There was such a demand for intellectual property lawyers in New York and other major cities. And I interviewed at a bunch of different firms. The firm that I ended up was at Fitzpatrick Tella where you and I both summered. Yeah. And that's where we met. there were a few people at that firm who had gone to Brinkley and Pearson, knew the school, knew the facts.

that a lot of us have technical degrees and really embrace that because at the time there were so many more IP boutiques that were still operating in a lot of the major cities. And patent law was an area where a lot of lawyers just thought, like those patent engineers, wasn't big money yet until they discovered litigation. And so the patent...

boutiques were the ones that handling a lot of the litigation that, you know, for billion dollar blockbuster drugs. those types of drugs. So it was, it was just serendipity that I was recruited and was graduating at a time where there was a need for, for the type of lawyer that I was becoming and getting trained for to come into the city. So

cases.

Speaker 2 (23:19.062)

when I got the offer and the offices at the time were at 30 Ra, which, you know, that building's so gorgeous with the rainbow room at the top and yeah.

such a landmark big apple in the landmark building. And how long were you there? You were there for quite a while.

I couldn't say no. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 (23:42.55)

I was there for four years as an associate and got very lucky because during that time I made some amazing friends and also had the opportunity to go to trial.

Yeah, I think the first four or five years of one's career out of law school, they tend to be the most formative, impactful years.

Our class is so small in comparison, right? think we had 20, which was a big one at the time. Everybody's learning, you're learning the craft at the time. You're doing research, you're learning the law. And the fact that I was at an IP boutique, it let me go very, very deep on that subject matter. learning that area of law, whether it was patent law or trademark law was, I think a luxury that maybe you don't

always have if you're going into a general practice firm out of law school and focusing on litigation in general. That said, I do think that one of the most useful classes I ever took in law school was one that I didn't realize was so useful until I got to the law firm and that was Civ Pro. I mean, federal rules, civil procedure, just...

This is

Speaker 2 (25:02.402)

how many times did I reread the rules to try to figure out how to count the days, right? This is what associates do, is try to figure out like, are we filing on time? Are we doing this in the right way? So just the minutia of going in and being able to read and teach yourself how to actually use rules was a new way, I think, of realizing that what they teach you in law school, you can apply many times to what you're doing, but.

I think at a boutique where you're responsible for many things in addition to learning your cases, learning your documents, you also do things like find your own, you know, trial exhibits and learn how to deliver things on your own, fax things on your own. think that all of the support functions that you're doing on your own at a

a smaller firm is very helpful for when you go into in-house because in-house you don't have everything set up to support the lawyers anymore. The lawyers aren't the business, the business is the business and the lawyers are there to support the business. so knowing how to do things like, you know, label your documents, produce them on your own, all super helpful to go in-house. Yeah.

Very interesting. You said that you also got to go to trial while you were at Fitzpatrick.

did I got less

Speaker 1 (26:36.482)

Was that exciting?

It was exciting. lot of the cases that are litigated under the Hatch-Waxman Act, under abbreviated new drug applications, infringement was already admitted because the generic is coming on to say, you know, my, my drug is bio equivalent to this brand name drug. It's not about infringement because infringement is, is basically conceded, but there are some exceptions to that. And I was working on a case where the drug was a biological.

which took it out of this exception or this situation and it was a transplant drug. And so I learned so much about that area of medicine and drug. And then I got to go to trial because the case went to trial and there were no concessions of any issues. So that was, that was pretty exciting and also very stressful.

Um, I was just a, you know, think a second associate grunt at that time. Wow. Just doing whatever the partners needed me to do, getting to know the exhibits and making sure that all of the things were paired. But it was really great experience.

Where was the trial?

Speaker 2 (27:57.578)

It was in Delaware, the district of Delaware. Okay.

So how long did you end up?

going there.

feel like the trial might have been a week. Maybe we're out there for a couple of weeks in the war room. like a long time ago now. is a long time ago.

It is the long time ago now.

Speaker 2 (28:22.458)

I that time is also when I realized that my own health and my own growth were just as important then to me than the firm's goals and the case were. I had pulled so many all-nighters. Well, I think everybody is used doing that when you come in as a first year. There are so many expectations to meet and

especially for somebody who doesn't have any kind of legal background or cultural knowledge about what being a lawyer is or how to navigate that environment. I just did whatever I had to do or I thought had to be done for the work to be done for the cases to be well litigated. one day I remember thinking, I just pulled two all-nighters.

I'm going to pull a letter for myself and do my own resume and get that done because it, I'm just as important to myself as the firm is to me.

That's interesting. When you first started talking about your trial experience, that's not where I thought you were going to go with that. So even though the trial experience was a good opportunity for you as a junior associate to get some hands-on experience, it also ended up being kind of a turning point for you, I guess. So did you then leave Fitzpatrick shortly thereafter?

I didn't leave the firm then because I worked for a partner who I felt was looking out for me. That was giving me great experience and I had so much more to learn from him. one thing that my parents give me excellent career advice all the time continues to this day. But my dad said, it is very hard to find a good boss.

Speaker 2 (30:30.894)

And I thought about it he said, are you still learning? And I said, yes. He said, don't be in a rush. Don't be in a rush to make a change because that relationship can really define what your happiness is day to day in your work. And I think that if you look now at a lot of the HR research, that's all true. They say that people don't leave

job, they leave people, they leave their managers. And so I am so grateful for the fact that the partner I worked for at the time, Nick Callis, I just felt like I had so much to learn from him and that he kept me there for two more years that I probably wouldn't have stayed had I not been learning so much and felt that there was just such an investment in me and felt like he cared.

So I remember Nick as well. It sounds like he really was a great manager, great boss. And so you ended up staying a couple of years longer because of the personal bond and the relationship that you had with the people at Fitzpatrick. But then you did reach, I guess, a point where

another opportunity came along that offered potentially more growth potentials.

did. about four years out, I realized that I wanted to learn more faster. And with a firm like Fitzpatrick, where they're just at the top of their game with these large pharmaceutical cases, those cases are so important for the companies that are clients of the firm, that they're not necessarily paying for younger associates to cut their teeth on on

Speaker 1 (32:05.315)

Thanks

Speaker 2 (32:34.286)

You know, even discovery motions. Yeah, that's interesting. type of sort of on your feet court work. And I felt like I had it in me. I felt ambitious and I wanted, I knew that I had the energy to devote to learning more, learning faster. And because the firm couldn't give me that experience at the time, I did look outside and I ended up going to Hale and Doar.

in York City because they also had very similar clients to Fitzpatrick-Chela, but also had a larger practice and was a larger firm and so had other types of litigation where you could get that type of experience on your feet. I went, at law firms, I've only ever done intellectual property litigation, whether it was,

patents or at Hale and Doar I actually did branch out a little bit into trademark as well. That was so fun. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I did end up branching from pharmaceutical patent litigation into software and systems. And so that gave me a new vocabulary. It brought some of the engineering concepts that I had studied in college back. And

That's all we

Speaker 2 (34:00.758)

I had, it was, I got to work on smaller cases where I could take more responsibility and really learn the craft and take ownership of, know, pieces of the case that wouldn't necessarily have been the case if how they stayed. Yeah.

For me, one of the things I found uninspiring from my one summer at Fitzpatrick doing IP litigation was the lack of human interaction. I would spend weeks researching one narrow legal issue and then write a memo on it and present it to the partner. And that was about it as far as...

contact with people in within the context of like the actual work assignment. Knowing you and knowing how incredibly social you are, I'm kind of baffled. I wonder if the summer experience was not really representative or at least the one that I had was not really representative of the actual associate experience.

Well, feel like, so there's so many different thoughts in my head right now. I remember being a summer associate and sitting in on a deposition as second chair and I...

was listening to answers that the witness was giving, the partner I was working for was taking the deposition. And I would write follow-up questions on a post-it and then hand them over to him because I didn't know that that wasn't necessarily something that the partner did not want or didn't expect a summer solstice to be doing. And because I had no concept of it,

Speaker 2 (36:00.618)

I just did it. And I think that not knowing has, there's like a double edge sort of that. There is the doing of the thing without any inhibition because you don't know any better and you don't know what the culture is. But there's also the other side, which is because you don't know, you don't necessarily feel yourself and you don't necessarily know if you fit in and you don't know all of the unspoken messages that are at the firm.

And so my summer associate experience was very much in the positive side of that ignorance, you know, coupled with a little bit of the, I call partners by their first name? How do I answer the phone? that was.

You know, always very in my mind, you know, with your, when you're growing up and your parents always tell you respect your elders, you never call anybody by their first names. You know, my, husband never once called my parents by their first names. Like he went straight from Mr. Mrs. Ku to mom and dad after like 10 years. So, you know, there's no,

Yeah, there's no handbook on that.

There's no handbook. No. There's no handbook. But then when I came in as an associate, you learn a little bit more about what the culture is. And I think back then anyway, the culture I understood was associates are, you're there for your hands and your brain. You're not there for your mouth, right? You are there to absorb information and provide it in a curated fashion.

Speaker 2 (37:41.634)

but you don't speak up at meetings and you know, your job is to make sure the details are taken care of, but you're seen and not heard. I don't think that's always the case. And that might not have been the case on every single team, but I also think that there was this pressure to be right when you speak and. Right.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:09.454)

That pressure continues. And I think that that's something that we as women actually deal with a lot when we're in a professional setting. As Asian women, think also there's an expectation that you know what you're talking about. Maybe that's an expectation we put on ourselves. And so I was much more reticent when I came in as an associate thinking that I had to

fit in more with the culture than when I was a summer associate, when it was just all like, you're just wide-eyed because you're just learning everything for the first time.

Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely something to be said about, you know, finding our voice, right? And it's also a question of, am I trying to find a voice that others will find pleasant and acceptable? Or am I actually trying to find my true voice?

who are always learning when it comes to that. And the goal, I think my more recently set goal in the last few years is to try to be more myself and.

be in a place where I could feel like I'm more myself. And I have to say that right now, where I am today, professionally, I feel like I can be more myself than ever. I definitely feel like an in-house path for me was a better fit than being at a law firm. And I think to your point about having that internal voice and thinking,

Speaker 2 (39:57.92)

I wonder if we're just trained this way, but I used to think that the more senior associates and partners were testing me when they asked me to do certain research, right? Because they must know the answer to all of these things and why they need my research for it, right? And so I always felt like I was being tested against this bar until- that's interesting.

I didn't know that you actually thought that. Wow.

I did think that. And then it got later in my career when I realized, no, they've probably just forgotten it and nobody asks for research that they already know. Nobody wants that. They really do want to know the answer. Maybe there's been a change in the law or some kind of update. So what you're doing is not useless. I mean, that kind of thinking, who thinks those things? I did.

You did at one point.

Speaker 1 (41:01.486)

Thanks so much for listening. Join us on Wednesday for more of this candid conversation between me and Karen. Until then, be well and be happy.