The Real Lawyer: Caren Khoo (Part 2)

In this episode, Verizon VP & Deputy General Counsel Caren Khoo shares her 17-year journey from patent litigator to corporate legal leader. She reveals how transitioning from BigLaw to in-house counsel transformed her career - from the surprising similarities in litigation work to the liberating shift away from billable hours. Caren discusses her evolution through multiple Verizon divisions, now leading a 40-person legal team supporting business operations, product development, and AI governance. With refreshing honesty, she reflects on how managing vaccine production lines at 22 unexpectedly prepared her for legal leadership, and why she's found her true passion in building high-performing legal teams.

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:05.56)
Welcome back to the Real Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Joy Sophia Hsu, and you're joining us today for the second part of my conversation with my good friend, Karen Koo, VP and Deputy General Counsel at Verizon.

Speaker 2 (00:36.334)
Karen, so after Fitzpatrick and Wilmer Hale, it really sounded like you found your professional home, your calling when you went in house. It's been quite a while now, right? How long have you been at Verizon now?

Yes, almost 17 years.

Was there anything that was unexpected when you first joined Verizon? Did your day to day going to change a lot?

Yes and no. When I joined Verizon, I joined as a patent litigator. And ironically, on my very first day in the office, I ran into my former colleagues at WilmerHale because they were doing work on an antitrust case for Verizon. And so that was awesome. It just felt so welcoming that I go to the cafeteria in this giant office building and I ran into like a team of lawyers and paralegals that I already knew.

Yeah, that was very fun. But litigation in-house is schedule-wise very similar to what litigation is outside at a law firm. And at the time, the practice at Verizon was to have in-house lawyers do a lot of the work that outside counsel will do. And that was actually one of the draws of taking the job, because the person who hired me said you can do as much or as little as you would like of the hands-on litigation. so

Speaker 1 (02:03.988)
I still had experience taking and defending depositions. I was still able to examine witnesses of trial. It was really fun. It was a great practice. But it was very different as an environment because you're one of very few. I was the first patent litigator lawyer dedicated to patent litigation that was hired into the Verizon

at the time wireline side of the house. So bios and network and things like that, but not wireless. everybody, when I joined, everybody had a family. All of my colleagues that I met were different parts of the legal department. They all had families. They all expected you to spend time with your family and, you know, or have hobbies outside of work.

and spend time outside of work doing the things that you enjoyed with your family and friends. That I felt was a very big difference between the culture of a law firm and in-house. And part of that is because the billable hour at law firms is so all-consuming. You know what you're being measured on. You're being measured on billable hours.

You know what the maximum of that is, but you can only do that for three days before you actually died. So.

You know, being in-house was a relief because the billable hour went away and I could still work like I wanted to work or that I was used to working. So I have pulled many all-nighters in-house, which is not something I'm super proud of, but also speaks a little bit more to my working style versus what I thought I was required to do earlier on in my career.

Speaker 1 (04:05.334)
I feel like that freedom of doing the work that you need to get done in the way that you think it should be done is a freedom that I have felt in-house because there is no billable hour and that just never gets old.

Yeah. I feel like when you were saying that talking about the freedom, it's like, you know, Oregon music started playing like, wow, hallelujah.

Hahaha!

The weight of that just lifted, right? Yeah, that is something that I think a lot of us wish wasn't really part of the system. And I was just thinking before we got on that I'm starting to really understand the title of general counsel. Cause when you're in-house at a company, especially a large multinational one like yours,

You're not specialty counsel anymore, You're, you're dealing with so many different aspects of the business and so many legal issues and in different jurisdictions. So I think over the course of the 17 years, you've been at at least four or five different businesses within Verizon. Is that right? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 1 (05:29.56)
Yeah, I have held many different roles at Verizon. If you just count my reporting changes, it's probably been...

Speaker 1 (05:48.046)
or so. then if you count, if you looked at the portfolio of work that I've done, I've had at least 10 to 12 changes in the different groups I've supported or areas of law that my team and I have been involved in supporting the business on. So I think you're totally right about this idea that specialty counsel is different.

than what general counsel is. I feel like at a law firm, specialization and just being the very top of your game in a particular legal area is what gives you the greatest value because companies are coming to you for your expertise. are coming to you for your experience in dealing with similar or the same issues, but across the board, not just for their issue or their-

their matter.

In-house, what makes you more versatile, I'm not going to say valuable because I think there are different paths in-house, including a specialist path. What makes you more versatile is generalization. So you have the opportunity to get to know your client, which is the business, which are people that are in different roles in the business. You get to know them very, very well.

And you get to understand how the different pieces of the business fit together. And that's where I feel like going into a company as a litigator is actually such a great training ground because I learned all of my network architecture as a patent litigator at Verizon. learned, you know, how do product development teams work with marketing, take a product to launch and then how to sales then, you know,

Speaker 1 (07:45.014)
work with that? are our customers looking at? How does the network work? What is the technology behind that? All of that piecing the story together is something that is a litigator's bread and butter. And you had said, you know, it seems so dry when you're spending time over the summer. I think the thing about being a litigator is you have to go very deep on a particular issue, meaning the case, and the case has different components to it.

But you spend that time learning all of it, and then you have to piece it together and figure out what the story is. So there's a lot of discussion now about storytelling and that type of marketing, for example, or being able to communicate effectively through storytelling. And I think litigators have been doing that, and that's really what a trial lawyer does, right?

And that's what you're doing when you're writing a brief or you're making an oral argument is that you're telling a story. So I feel like having that litigation background and coming to the company that way to learn how everything comes together was so useful. And then it allowed me to springboard into other roles that maybe were not exactly patent law, but allowed me to use a lot of the concepts that I had learned, you

in patent law, whether classes or litigation, and then also understand what the end state could be and how to avoid that to be able to counsel the clients. So moving from patent litigation to product development, for example, was a pretty natural move because now you're going from end stage to beginning stage. And it's so much fun because you're helping the clients develop and launch

new businesses, new products that they had at ideation and you're there at the table with the development teams to help figure out, okay, like if you go this direction, we're going to have maybe these issues to care for. So if you go in this direction, might be a little bit easier to get through, you whatever it is. Or it's also a very natural way for somebody who was really only familiar with one type of law.

Speaker 1 (10:11.874)
to learn things like privacy, to learn things like security issues, other issues that you need to know for a product launch that might not naturally have been in a patent litigation portfolio.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Karen, speaking of the number of different roles that you've taken on ever-rise, and I think you said that you're on like role number seven now. So tell me a little bit more about what you're doing now, because it is from what I understand, a fairly recent role that you just took on.

Yes. In the beginning of this year, I moved over to the business side of Verizon, which is the side that serves small and medium businesses, global enterprises, public sector, international, multinational companies. And I'm in that business unit legal function. Prior to that, I had been mainly in

corporate functions, whether like IP, for example, or IP litigation where I started, or supporting teams that were global in nature, but ran under every Verizon business, like supporting IT, which is under every single business unit, as well as network at Verizon, or working on technology and product development that would feed either the consumer or business.

customers or both. And now what I do is I serve one side of the business mainly from a legal perspective and my teams and I support every legal function except for straight sales deals. whether it's compliance for security incidents, privacy, regulatory compliance,

Speaker 1 (12:22.83)
Whether it's marketing, product development, development of solutions for complex deals, global customer operations, so dealing with customer care, figuring out how to make our systems and our employee experiences more optimized and better for our customers.

those are some of the functions that I support today. So it really is a generalist function across the entirety of the business. And then I have peers who support the sales deals for the different channels that we sell in.

Mm-hmm. mean, that's so multifaceted and, And you must, How many people report to you now?

on my total team, there are 40 and this is, mean, the team is so amazing. I think that this is one of the, this is one of the big differences between, you know, when I imagined what a lawyer would do and what I do today for my job. I'm so much closer to what I would, what I thought I would be doing in business than what I would be doing.

If I continued at a law firm and on the partnership track, have clients, I love working with my clients. have a lot of meetings. talk about a lot of things, but there's a lot of counseling that goes on in the job. And then the other side of the role, which is the bigger side of the role is really leading a and bringing different teams together. So in January, when I made the move, I.

Speaker 1 (14:16.084)
only had half of the functions that I just talked about. And in September, the product. Team and the technology solutions, legal teams joined my team, double it to 40. And this is where I have really felt myself growing and making mistakes. but really just, this is one of the largest teams I've ever.

managed and led and there are different teams coming together. And so just trying to figure out how do we work together? How do we share information? How do we do this more efficiently? How can we help the clients solve their problems and get to their goals in a faster and really less burden some way for us as well as for them? I think about those things a lot.

And I think about things like, how do we get more embedded with our clients to make sure that we're at the table when we want to have discussions and make sure that we're giving the right counsel, as well as understanding what the context is so that our legal advice is informed by the business and the business goals. I think that's super important in-house. know, but when I think about it, I've actually managed more people in my professional career before, just not as a lawyer.

My first job out of college, had 75 people who were reporting to me. Right.

You've come full circle.

Speaker 1 (15:43.822)
It's starting to look that way and I never, this is not planned. It's just how things have worked out. So, you know, I used to think.

There's no point in this follow your passion idea, because if I followed my passions, I would either be a personal shopper or a restaurant critic. I guess those are still options, but what I really love about my job is that I get to lead a team. And that to me brings a lot of fulfillment and it's very challenging because

Every, you have to really try to understand people, be curious about your team and, have always be thinking and assuming good intent.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, cause I think, you know, it goes back to everyone's got their own circumstances and life experiences and, and everyone's tried their best. so yeah, I'm just thinking back to when you first made the move to Verizon, then you were, still working as an IT litigator. And now you're, you're essentially at the helm of,

40 % legal team that's play like running a, mis-sized law firm within, within a large company. That's, that's so exciting. It has your day to day changed dramatically over the years.

Speaker 1 (17:26.968)
My day to day has changed dramatically over the years. In the beginning, when you're doing litigation, you're really trying to learn what happened in the case. You're looking backwards a lot. I think that's the nature of litigation. Now, in some ways, it's a luxury to be able to do that because everything has already been set. So you're just trying to discover facts and you're trying to discover what's going on.

And I remember when I first joined Verizon, even that discovery process came with a vocabulary that I didn't know. So after two days of the first two days on the job, I had a list of 200 words and phrases that I didn't know. And I thought I was going to die. really, had no telecom experience before that. My dad's a telecom engineer. actually retired from Lucent Bell Labs and, you know, shockingly,

joining Verizon and becoming a lawyer here has given us so many things to talk about and a vocabulary I never knew that I needed to have this conversation. Very similar to when my mom got to post for the first time and she worked for a pharmaceutical company and finally she could understand what I did for work a little bit more as well. So sidebar is that becoming a lawyer has given me so much more to talk about with my parents.

day to day and be able to understand what their experience were working and have them understand what I do. But that learning curve, every time you switch jobs, when you're in-house and you're staying in the same company, you can build on what you've learned in a much more direct way than say you're on firm, you're working different cases.

the technologies, the people, at some point they repeat or people move around. And so you develop these long relationships with people because you're interested in what they do. They're interested in what you do. Your job is to help and to understand their goals, to make them your goals and to help the business. And so I feel like with every transition that I have

Speaker 1 (19:48.51)
at Verizon, first from IP litigation to product development, from product development to had a very interesting job being the head of state public policy for AOL and Yahoo when those were part of Verizon and then being a data governance lawyer to to understand how to responsibly share data between the companies or externally if necessary. And then from there moving into the core of Verizon.

supporting IT across all of the business units, technology and product development, picking up the patent teams at that point, patent prosecution and licensing to know what are all the new things that people are working on and then how do we, how do we license that to protect Verizon's interest or to monetize? you know, I moved into another role where I still kept IT, but I picked up finance operations, all the money coming in and out of the company, all the transactions that

we do with customers, with our vendors, digital trust and safety? How do we maintain content standards on our platforms like Fios? And then supply chain risk management, which is such a hot topic now, and understanding how do we source materials, technology, and how do we do that in a responsible way?

of establishing the Responsible AI program at Verizon. That was what I did, you two years ago. And so this is, I've been able to do so many different things and I feel like everything builds on each other. Yeah. So that now in this role, the subject matter is not foreign. It is really just...

trying to understand, now there are new things, maybe there are pieces of the business that haven't worked with before, how do they relate back to what I have experienced and who does these things and am I still curious enough to learn and spend the time learning? I think the fact that I am is an indicator of happiness. It's an indicator that I'm interested in my job and that, you know, I'm interested in people around me.

Speaker 1 (22:11.414)
And my team is amazing. So there is no way that I could be doing the job that I have today without a phenomenal team. And part of having a phenomenal team is seeing people for their strengths, putting them in roles where those strengths can shine and making sure that people feel seen and heard. So that takes a lot of time. There's no shortcut.

to getting to know people and there's no shortcut to building a strong culture where people feel safe, to be able to tell you what they really think, what they really need. So, and everybody is so different about those things that there's room for an entire team to be built. And not everybody is the same because you're thinking about things differently. People have different interests. They have different backgrounds. They have different lived experiences. I feel like

That is

Well, Karen, think speaking of following your passion, I think you have found your passion.

think maybe.

Speaker 2 (23:25.036)
Yeah, listening to you and looking at you. I definitely see and hear a consistent theme at this, you know, passion for learning, passion for growth. Beyond that, I think there's always been like such an interest in connecting with people and building a team. And you're living your dream. You're loving your passion now.

And I think that's really amazing. Congratulations, Karen.

Thank you, Joyce. You know, it's so funny you say that because I didn't, I don't think that I knew that this was the job for me that I wanted all along until it became my job. Right. And there's not that many places where a lawyer is valued for their relationship skills, their ability to

identify and grow talent. and people talk about it, but this is actually a management skill and people study it. so I feel like I've had some very amazing, amazing mentors and sponsors at Verizon who have shown me what good leadership is and people who have helped me in ways where

I know they've helped me and it might not have helped them themselves personally in a personal way, but it helped me. And to have leaders like that show you what good leadership is gives you a model to be able to do that yourself. And it gives me the confidence and the empowerment to know that I can do that for my team and be supported. So that environment, that is very special.

Speaker 1 (25:22.54)
And I don't know if that's everywhere in house. I don't know if that's, I think you can find it anywhere, but I do feel like I've been extremely lucky to be in this environment and to be able to grow in this way.

Speaker 2 (25:43.224)
Thanks so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Join us on Friday for more deep insights from Karen. Until then, be well and be happy.