Karen A Popp

Practice Areas

KAREN A. POPP is the global co-leader of the firm’s White Collar: Government Litigation and Investigations group. Karen’s practice focuses on high-stakes matters with legal, political, and public relations components, such as global internal investigations, defense against U.S. Department of Justice and SEC Enforcement investigations, Congressional investigations, OIG and State Attorney General actions, corporate compliance, and litigation. In the last year, Chambers Global and Chambers USA recognized Karen as a leader in the fields of White Collar and FCPA, National Law Journal named her a Crisis Leadership Trailblazer, Global Investigations Review named her a Top 30 FCPA Practitioner in the U.S.A., Euromoney Expert Guides 2021 edition of the “Best of the Best USA,” named her a Top 30 “White Collar Crime” practitioner, and Benchmark Litigation named her a National White Collar Defense Star. Karen previously served as Associate White House Counsel to President Clinton, a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, and an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York. She began her career on Wall Street.

Karen represents clients across a host of industries and often in crisis management situations. Her clients range from major corporations to prominent business, political, and sports figures, including a U.S. Presidential Cabinet Member, a Corporate CEO and a General Counsel, senior FBI official, an NFL team senior officer, and a Big Ten football coach. She has been retained to conduct confidential internal investigations in more than 70 countries, defend corporations and individuals in government investigations, and advise corporate boards relating to alleged FCPA and OFAC violations, securities and financial fraud, accounting irregularities, environmental crimes, kickbacks, tax fraud, qui tams, misuse of corporate assets, false claims, antitrust, corruption, fraud, whistleblower, “Me Too,” racial, gender, inequality, and other misconduct claims.

Karen also assists clients in designing and enhancing corporate compliance and ethics programs, and currently serves as outside counsel to several corporate compliance departments. She has conducted global compliance and risk assessments for numerous U.S. and non-U.S. companies. Karen helps companies to respond to internal allegations of wrongdoing, conducts training for boards of directors, management, compliance departments and other company personnel, and conducts compliance due diligence regarding corporate acquisitions and joint ventures.