Karen Elizabeth Campbell
The most lethal strategist
you never heard of.
If I’m ever the story, I’ve failed.
You won’t see my name in a deposition, a byline, or the headline. I work in the background — the work shows up in the outcome.
The lawyers won the case at Hopkins.
I won the narrative.
The offer was $50 million.
The settlement was $190 million.
That is not the beginning of a career. That is the middle of one.
Who I Am
I have been in plaintiff litigation communications for twenty-five years. Before that I was a reporter at Dow Jones. I know what it takes to get a story placed because I spent years deciding whether to place one. I know what a producer needs before they ask because I used to be the one asking.
That is not a credential you can hire. It is a perspective you either have or you do not.
I am a former journalist who built a plaintiff-side communications operation specifically to counter what Kirkland & Ellis, FTI Consulting, Sitrick and Company, Brunswick Group, and TrailRunner International deploy against plaintiff attorneys in mass tort, MDL, class action, and catastrophic injury cases.
Outgunned
Billion-dollar companies don’t just fight lawsuits — they run sophisticated communications machines built to isolate your clients and control the story.
I break those machines.
I build the narrative that cuts through the clutter and makes people stop and ask: what happened, why should I care, and what do I do about it. Win that, and the institution becomes the story.
Five Mass Tort Cases. The Same Pattern Every Time.
An institution knew.
It said nothing.
People were harmed.
I ran the counter-narrative in the space the defense owned.
At Hopkins the offer was $50 million. The settlement was $190 million. At every case the pattern was the same.
The narrative moved the number.
Lead communications strategist. Dr. Nikita Levy. 9,000 victims. Over one million impressions in 24 hours — NYT, WaPo, CBS, WSJ.
900+ child victims. The worst case of single-perpetrator sexual abuse in the country. The institution knew. Communications served the victims while holding the institution accountable.
Eight years of fraudulent medical practice at a Maryland hospital. Communications reached victims who did not know they had been harmed by a practitioner with a fraudulent license.
215 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Floridan Aquifer. 19-day concealment. Communications placed the concealment story alongside the contamination story.
Nuclear testing fallout. Families who developed cancer at rates the government tracked and did not disclose. Communications work was about recognition — making people understand what had been done to them.
Nuclear contractor crisis communications lead in Nebraska. Multi-stakeholder, multi-site federal crisis communications across 70 sites simultaneously.
How I Work
A limited number
of retained clients.
I run my own operations. I answer my own email and return every call within the hour — you are not buying a firm, you are buying direct access to the strategist. When the matter demands scale, I assemble a vetted bench matched to the circumstance, none with fewer than ten years of experience. The lead never changes: me.