Karen Gillen

Senior Counsel

  • Office Contact Info
  • Biography

    Karen Gillen is an employment lawyer who understands the challenges corporations face and quickly identifies cost-effective and practical strategies for overcoming those challenges. 

    Karen represents employers in class, representative and collective actions, and single and multi-plaintiff lawsuits in employment matters. She litigates a range of claims including discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination, breach of employment contract, and ERISA.  She also enforces and defends against claims involving restrictive covenants.  Karen successfully represents employers in federal and state courts, and arbitration before FINRA, AAA, and JAMS.  She appears before administrative agencies including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, the New York State Division of Human Rights, the New York City Human Rights Commission, and several other state and local administrative agencies, and has prevailed on her clients’ behalf or negotiated very favorable resolutions in those forums.

    Karen is a trusted advisor and strategic partner to clients and their allied advisors, assisting with challenges they face including compliance, sensitive investigations, classification issues, and termination decisions.  She has worked with organizations to build processes and policies from the ground up. Clients turn to Karen for guidance on workforce reductions, executive departures, and cutting-edge issues where there has been little or no precedential guidance such as COVID-19, various executive orders, and the FTC Rule banning non-compete clauses.

    Karen also assists clients with drafting employment agreements, severance agreements, and restrictive covenants, and advises companies on employment and labor issues arising in mergers and acquisitions. 

    Karen works with publicly held, privately held, and family-owned businesses in a variety of industries including financial services, media and entertainment, technology, aviation, property management, and construction, among others.  

    Before joining the firm, Karen was a partner in both a full-service and international employment boutique firm.  She also served as associate general counsel at American Airlines, where she led the employment and benefits team through the merger with US Airways.  
     

    Admissions

    • New York 
    • New Jersey     
    • Arizona     
    • U.S. District Court, Eastern and Southern District of New York
    • U.S. District Court, New Jersey
    • U.S. District Court, Arizona 
    • U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth and Ninth Circuits

    Memberships

    • Society for Human Resource Management
       
  • Practice Areas
  • Representative Experience

    Representative Experience

    • Obtained dismissal of a complaint against an employer alleging breach of a collective bargaining agreement, collusion with a union in the union’s alleged breach of duty of fair representation, and ERISA violations. 
    • Defeated summary judgment in a case challenging the application of the Massachusetts Earned Sick Time Law as applied to airlines.  The client later prevailed at trial. 
    • Obtained summary judgment on behalf of a corporation and its fiduciaries in a lawsuit alleging that an option in the corporation's 401k plan violated ERISA, and successfully defended that ruling on appeal. 
    • Successfully opposed class certification in a lawsuit alleging that a defined benefit plan's older
    • mortality tables used to calculate a retiree's joint and survivor annuity resulted in a substantially lower retirement benefit than if the plan used updated mortality tables.
    • Successfully defended employers on numerous occasions before FINRA, JAMS and AAA.
    • Obtained dismissal of charges and negotiated favorable outcomes before a variety of administrative agencies including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the New York State Division of Human Rights, the New York City Human Rights Commission, and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights.
    • Conducted or advised on numerous sensitive investigations.
    • Devised solutions for minimizing risk relative to 50-state compliance issues. 
    • Led the American Airlines employment and benefits legal team through the merger with US Airways that created the world's largest airline.
       
  • Publications & Presentations

    Publications

    • Featured, Karen Gillen Joins GRSM in New York City and Phoenix Offices (July 2024)
    • The Fair Labor Standards Act (Ellen C. Kearns ed.), 2005 Cumulative Supplement, Bloomberg Industry Group
    • Wage and Hour Laws: A State-By-State Survey (Gregory K. McGillivary, ed., 2005), Bloomberg Industry Group
    • Pink Slipped Employees Seeing red, NewsLedger (July/August 2001)
    • Previous contributing Author, Ask the Experts column, The Arizona Republic

    Presentations

    • Commentator, 73rd Annual NYU Conference on Labor, August 2020
    • Presented on various employment law issues to multiple state bar associations, including the State Bar of Arizona’s annual CLE-By-The-Sea programs
       
  • Education

    Education

    J.D., Arizona State University—Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, magna cum laude, 1996

    • Order of the Coif
    • Arizona State Law Journal—Note and Comment Editor

    B.S., Accounting, Rutgers University, 1993

    • High Honors
    • Phi Beta Kappa
    • Beta Gamma Sigma

    Honors

    • Clerk to the Honorable Philip E. Toci, Arizona Court of Appeals, 1996-1997
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