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Connor M. Karen is a trial attorney licensed in California since November of 2017, and who joined Kirtland & Packard LLP in January of 2018. Connor works in a variety of practice areas, having litigated in the context of catastrophic personal injury, employment and educational discrimination, wage-and-hour, land use, fraud, elder abuse, whistleblower and other cases.
Mr. Karen focuses on cases that affect the public interest in some noteworthy way. He currently devotes a significant portion of his work to qui tam or “whistleblower” cases arising under the False Claims Act. The False Claims Act allows whistleblowers (or “relators”) with knowledge of fraud on the government’s budget to recover damages on behalf of the United States or any of the various States (and some counties and/or local municipalities), when contractors defraud federal, state or local governments out of public funds by submitting false or fraudulent requests for reimbursement.
Connor has assisted False Claims Act whistleblowers in multiple contexts, including fraudulent billing under government contracts and fraudulent government contract procurement in violation of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), false Medicare claims for products that violate the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), fraudulent evasion of customs duties through knowing mischaracterizations of imported foreign products to United States Customs and Border Protection, and others.
Connor focuses the majority of his practice on select employment discrimination, catastrophic personal injury, wage-and-hour class action, or other public interest cases.
He is well-versed in California state and federal motion practice, having written and personally argued substantially every type of motion relevant to civil litigation, before California state and federal courts. Connor also has appellate experience, having prepared and argued civil appeals before the California Court of Appeals and the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Connor’s expertise in legal research and writing, coupled with his conviction and enthusiasm for pursing justice on behalf of civil plaintiffs, results in a creative advocacy style that often lends his clients an edge in contentious cases.
For example, the first case he filed as a lawyer, on behalf of five victims of brain injuries resulting from use of an electroconvulsive therapy device, resulted in a judicial opinion (Riera v. Somatics (C.D. Cal.) 2018 WL 6242154) that expanded protection to patients and consumers. It did so by clarifying the responsibilities of medical providers to warn patients of risks based on risk indicators in the Food & Drug Administration’s public risk database called the Medical and User Facility Device Experience (MAUDE) database.
Mr. Karen conceptualized, filed and litigated the case on behalf of those five victims until resolution in the trial court. After appeal, in this same case, the California Supreme Court accepted and answered a legal question certified by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in favor of the Plaintiff. This resulted in the leading precedential opinion in California governing the “learned intermediary doctrine” applying to medical product liability lawsuits. Because of the California Supreme Court’s decision, patients injured by a medical device manufacturer’s failure to warn physicians of a serious risk inherent in a medical device can now prevail in a failure-to-warn lawsuit against a manufacturer where an objectively prudent patient would have declined treatment if adequately warned of the relevant risk – even where a hypothetical adequate warning about the risk from the device manufacturer to the patient’s physician would not have dissuaded the physician from prescribing the product to the injured patient.(Himes v. Somatics, LLC, June 20, 2024, No. S273887). The Himes decision has vast implications for medical product liability lawsuits in California, and significantly expands avenues of recovery for injured patients in civil lawsuits, as a result of this case Connor litigated on behalf of Michelle Himes and others in 2016.
In 2019, Mr. Karen’s work in an employment discrimination case, Louis v. City of Los Angeles et al., helped result in California’s 26th largest civil rights settlement of the year 2019.
In 2022, he represented a victim of child sexual abuse by an international church, resulting in a 7-figure recovery to the victim after resolution of the case in 2024.
Mr. Karen’s cases since bar admission in 2017 have otherwise resulted in several other high-six and seven figure recoveries for civil plaintiffs, including victims of physical injury, harassed employees, abused minors, and defrauded consumers.
Outside of the office, Connor enjoys playing and writing music on guitar and piano, racquet sports like tennis and pickleball, thinking and talking about politics and other philosophy, and roasting coffee beans.
Education
Connor received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with a minor in Philosophy, from California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo in 2014.
Connor received his J.D. degree in May of 2017 from the University of California at Davis at its Martin Luther King Hall, where he participated in Appellate Advocacy (Moot Court), served as a Senior Articles Editor for the Environs Law Journal, and participated in Humanitarian Aid Legal Outreach (HALO).
Honors
Southern California Super Lawyers Rising Star (reserved for top 2.5% of attorneys under the age of 40) between 2020 and 2024.
#26 (tie) California civil rights settlement of the year 2019 in Louis v. City of Los Angeles.
Publications
Parallel State Duties: Ninth Circuit Class Actions Premised on Violations of the FDCA’s Adverse Event Reporting Requirements
- Published in American Constitution Society’s Advance Law Journal in December 2017