Co-Chair of the Paul, Weiss Litigation Department, Karen Dunn is one of the nation’s top trial lawyers and is widely recognized for securing courtroom victories in difficult cases. Karen is also highly skilled at crisis management, advising companies, public figures and boards of directors as they navigate reputation-threatening investigations, government inquiries and media scrutiny—often all at the same time. She has been named a “Litigator of the Year” by The American Lawyer for her role in “high-stakes, high-profile and hard-fought” cases and has been recognized as a “Band 1” trial lawyer and a “Star Individual” by Chambers and Partners, which reports that Karen’s clients view her as “a go-to lawyer for your toughest, most challenging problems.”

Karen has successfully led many of the largest and most important trials of the past decade, including Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies, Inc., the hotly contested trade secrets “battle royale,” which settled favorably for Uber shortly after Karen’s examination at trial of former CEO Travis Kalanick; Malden Transportation, Inc. v. Uber Technologies, Inc., where she delivered a complete defense victory in a $750 million dispute after being brought in to lead the trial team just six weeks before trial; Epic Games Inc. v. Apple Inc., the high-stakes challenge to the App Store by the makers of Fortnite, which ended in victory for Apple following a three-week trial; Apple Inc. v. Qualcomm Incorporated, where she secured a $4 billion summary judgment win for Apple in the lead-up to trial; the Apple iPod iTunes Antitrust Litigation, a billion-dollar class action, which ended in a complete defense jury verdict; Oracle USA, Inc. v. Rimini Street, Inc., where she won trial victories in both 2015 and 2022 including a permanent injunction against Rimini over its copying of Oracle software; and ARM Ltd. v. Qualcomm Inc., where she secured a jury verdict for Qualcomm in a case worth tens of billions of dollars with far-reaching consequences for innovation and competition.

Karen has also led trial teams in landmark civil rights cases. In Sines v. Kessler, she won a groundbreaking verdict against the leaders of the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements in America responsible for the racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. Karen and the trial team’s work on this pathbreaking lawsuit was featured in the 2023 HBO documentary, "No Accident." Karen also led Council of the District of Columbia v. Gray, a hard-fought two-year battle in local and federal court to secure budget autonomy for the District of Columbia. She is Co-Executive Director of the Paul, Weiss Center to Combat Hate, an organization dedicated to fighting hate-driven violence and intimidation through impact litigation.

Karen is go-to counsel for clients in high-profile government, law enforcement and sensitive internal investigations. Among others, she prepared Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos for his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and UnitedHealth Group’s CEO Andrew Witty for back-to-back Senate and House hearings on the same day, following the largest-ever healthcare data breach. She also represented key witnesses asked to appear before the congressional committee investigating the killing of Americans in Benghazi; the New York Attorney General’s independent investigation of sexual harassment allegations against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo; and a high-profile witness in simultaneous investigations by the Department of Justice, an agency inspector general and a congressional committee; and she has guided major universities, philanthropies and companies in responding to enterprise-threatening allegations.