Partner
Email: kscarr@outsidegc.com
Karen has over twenty years of in-house experience at Fortune 500 companies. She has extensive experience advising on advertising clearance, contests and sweepstakes, and intellectual property (copyright, trademark, trade secrets, domain names), particularly in the retail and e-commerce space. Karen has drafted and negotiated a wide range of agreements, including inbound and outbound licensing agreements, NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, marketing, talent, collaboration, joint development, and consulting agreements. Her clients at Outside GC include Gap Inc., Inspire Clean Energy, and Tillys, among others.
Prior to joining Outside GC, Karen served as Associate General Counsel at Gap, Inc., where she led the IP and advertising legal team, overseeing brand protection and marketing support for the company’s iconic brands, including Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. She advised senior leaders on key business initiatives, including new brand launches and international expansion, negotiated strategic IP and marketing agreements, and defended infringement claims. For several years, she handled privacy matters, drafting internal and external company policies and counseling business partners on consumer-related privacy and security risks, including data breaches.
Before Gap Inc., Karen worked at Oracle as a senior attorney in the litigation, trademark and copyright group. In that role, she handled disputes involving software piracy, trade secret misappropriation, trademark infringement, and domain name arbitrations. She also advised and trained the company’s global IT, information security, and product security teams on privacy, data security, and IP issues and drafted policies on copyright compliance, email marketing, and acceptable use of Internet and email.
Karen began her legal career as an associate with Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP, where she worked on business litigation in several practice areas, including trade secret misappropriation, employment disputes, and securities fraud, as well as criminal defense. Karen left the firm to join Law.com as an editor to pursue her love of writing, but she missed serving clients and so returned to legal practice as an in-house counsel.
Karen has a B.A. in English from Yale University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She clerked for Judge William H. Orrick, Jr., U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and for Judge Joseph T. Sneed, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Karen is licensed to practice law in California and holds a CIPP/US certification. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Bar Association of San Francisco.
Karen has been a Bay Area resident long enough to remember the first dot-com boom. She lives in San Francisco.
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