“I wanted to be an actress,” Karen Koster Burr said, sitting in her office on the 21st floor in the downtown Jacksonville, Florida office of Brennan Manna and Diamond, where she is a partner and head of the Intellectual Property Section of the 40-attorney firm headquartered in Ohio. Twenty-six years ago, Karen graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in French Literature and Theatre Studies, having spent her junior year in Paris, France. “I went to a few auditions in New York City, but quickly realized the auditioning experience had too much uncertainty for my tastes,” Karen said, so she embarked on a career in international business using her language skills as a representative for a French company doing business in the U.S.
Karen planned to pursue a business degree at New York University but months before fall enrollment, she took a “summer trip” to Jacksonville that turned into a much longer stay. “I came to visit my mother and got an interesting job negotiating provider agreements with hospitals and doctors for a health insurer. Then I met my first husband and I never returned north,” she said. Two years after she established a satellite office for the company in Titusville, Florida, she found herself looking for more “formal education,” so enrolled in law school at Emory in Atlanta, Georgia under academic scholarship. Karen’s verbal skills turned out to be one of her greatest assets. She graduated from Emory with distinction in 1989 after being chosen as the Most Outstanding Woman Law Student.
Stuff Happens
“My husband left me at the end of law school,” Karen said, and so she started her legal career with an Atlanta law firm on a difficult note, practicing commercial law and civil litigation. Then a recruiter told her about a Jacksonville position handling interstate commerce issues with the railroad conglomerate CSX, which she accepted. “I enjoyed having one client,” she said; it allowed her to diversify her experiences in other legal fields, including environmental, corporate, and technology law. During that time Karen remarried and she now has two children. She eventually negotiated a part-time arrangement with her employer for a few years and, with ten years vested at CSX, left to start her own practice closer to home, delving into intellectual property law with CSX as her primary client. “IP was a natural interest for me,” Karen said; her appreciation of literature and language made her especially sensitive to trade name, copyright, and trademark issues.
Finding A Niche
Karen’s current position, which resulted from a phone call from a recruiter, finds her handling “transactional work, technology, Internet, and anything IP, but patents. The firm wanted someone to help them grow an IP practice,” she explained, “and I now have a diverse group of clients ranging from New York to north Florida, and from Washington, D.C., to Ohio.” She’s represented a musical rap duo, a family of musicians, make-up artists, foreigners doing business in the U.S., a group of doctors who are developing software, internationally known artists and large companies with trademark protection issues. “I love working on trademark issues,” she said, adding that she enjoys word games as an outlet. “My interest in languages [Karen is fluent in French, with a working knowledge of Italian, Spanish and German] and theater makes this diverse practice a perfect fit for me,” she said, admitting that her mother said she always, “had an answer for everything.”
Defining Success
“Success is having interesting, enjoyable work in which you can be competent, but ëbalance’ is the key,” she said, describing one of her own sculpture pieces that depicts two blended figures, a male and female. “This is the theme of my life,” she said. “I’m always trying to balance the creative with the analytical, family time with work life, and my exercise with my relaxation.” Karen also makes time for her own artwork and sings in a choir at her church. She has a short commute to the office and has a fully functional home office, allowing her some flexibility in her work schedule.
When asked about advice for younger attorneys, she stated that they should designate a career path early in their careers. The “biggest hole” in her career, Karen said, was not having a mentor. “My tendencies were to blaze a trail and not wait around for anyone,” she said, admitting that she had to work hard at training herself. “I would also recommend,” she added, “that young lawyers avoid going in-house too early in their careers because the trend now is to compartmentalize attorneys, which can limit the amount of training and experience available.” Her last piece of advice for young lawyers is to be cognizant of the reasons why so many attorneys are dissatisfied practicing law, and to be realistic about the trade-offs that come from pursuing the positions with the highest salaries, namely, the longer working hours.
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