25 Years Building Plaintiff-Side Coverage. Every Matter Still Runs Through Me.
No account managers, no junior staff fielding your calls — I answer my own phone, from the first audit to the verdict story.
From the Newsroom to the Courtroom
I started my career at Booz Allen, then spent five years as a reporter in the Dow Jones newsroom. I've spent the rest of it since making sure your case gets the coverage it deserves.
As a Dow Jones reporter, I learned firsthand what's newsworthy, what's verifiable, and what a skeptical editor will kill before it runs. I left the newsroom because I saw plaintiff-side firms losing the public narrative to defendants with in-house comms teams and outside PR firms, before a single deposition happened. Oliver & Ginger exists to close that gap: the same reporter's instinct I once brought to covering other people's stories, now applied to yours.
- Booz Allen: Started my career there before moving into journalism.
- Dow Jones newsroom: Five years as a reporter, learning firsthand what turns a filing into a wire story and what a reporter needs before they'll run it.
- The move to plaintiff-side comms: Built Oliver & Ginger to bring that same newsroom discipline to mass torts, MDLs, and catastrophic injury litigation — work most comms shops treat as an afterthought.
- The Johns Hopkins case: Ran communications on the matter that became a publicly reported $190M settlement for nearly 9,000 women — coverage picked up same-day by the AP, The Washington Post, NPR, and NBC News.
- Today: I'm your single point of contact and personally oversee every matter from day one. Depending on what the case needs, I bring in trusted people I've worked with for years — including Susan Oliver on client communications and victim advocacy — scaled to the matter, never a rotating cast of strangers.
Susan is also my closest friend. Years ago, both of us moved by the plight of wrongly convicted women, we started the Women's Innocence Clinic together — work we still do side by side today. Outside the firm, I'm the mother of two grown children, a lawyer and a teacher.
No associates, no account managers — every matter runs through me directly.
“Karen has the ability to get press no one else seems to get. She understands false narratives and knows how to tell the real story. Her media connections are unmatched.”
A Ph.D. in holistic and natural healing, with an undergraduate degree in pharmacy, that she applies directly in how survivors are supported.
She runs the client-facing side of every matter, so no one waiting on a case goes silent for months or turns to a forum for answers. Where I handle the public narrative, Susan handles the people living through it — the ones who call at 9pm because they can't sleep, the ones who need something explained a second or third time, the ones who need to hear a human voice, not a form letter.
- Regular updates: Plain-language briefings on a set schedule, so clients hear from us even when there's nothing new to report — silence reads as abandonment, and she doesn't let that happen.
- A steady presence: Listens, validates frustration with a slow process, and gives anxious or traumatized clients someone who answers the phone and stays on the line.
- Countering misinformation: Monitors what's circulating on forums and social media, and corrects rumors with a clear, accurate statement before panic spreads through the class.
- The Women's Innocence Clinic: Outside the firm, Susan and I run this together — both of us moved, years ago, by the plight of wrongly convicted women.
Every client hears from a real person on a real schedule — never a call center, never silence.
“Susan is the reason our clients never felt like a case number. She calls when it matters, she remembers the details, and she tells people the truth even when it's hard to hear.”
The system runs the same on a single verdict as it does on 9,000 claimants — it just moves faster.
Every engagement runs under the same guardrails, before a single call is made.
Getting Press and Changing Opinion Aren't the Same Thing.
If you're already generating coverage and public opinion still hasn't moved, the problem usually isn't volume — it's placement. I audit where your existing coverage is actually landing against where your real audience reads, and redirect the strategy to close that gap.
People have too much competing for their attention to absorb a story that doesn't answer, in order:
- What happened: Stated plainly, before anything else.
- Why they should care: Tied to something already on their mind, not assumed.
- What it's costing them: Concrete, not abstract — a real stake, not a statistic.
- What to do about it: A next step, every time. A story that skips this reads as noise — accurate, but easy to scroll past.