ATTORNEY KAREN WINNER

Karen Winner is considered a  legal authority on legal consumer issues and a leading light on legal reforms for consumers and vulnerable litigants in the courts. She is also a caring, experienced attorney. At the Law Office of Karen Winner, we aim to solve problems and find solutions for legal consumers in the civil courts. We provide consultation services, legal advocacy and strategy sessions. Karen is a big believer in listening to clients, and helping them make INFORMED choices before taking action. Karen Winner’s legal services involve four areas:

• Lawyer-Client relations. This includes: * serving as a communication liaison between clients and their attorneys; * providing reviews of  attorney retainers (attorney hiring agreements);* helping clients with cost control of legal fees; * representing clients in legal fee disputes with their lawyers; *offering mediation services in legal fee disputes;  * creating multidisciplinary teams to advance client objectives;  * offering objective analysis and information to help legal consumers navigate the civil court system, especially in family law.
• Americans with Disabilities Act Advocate for people in court with “invisible” disabilities — like PTSD, ADHD
• Women in Divorce: formulating strategy, combatting legal system abuse, providing objective advice to clients.

Before she became a lawyer, Karen Winner made a name for herself for her compelling investigations ferreting out official misconduct in the family court arena to help families access fairness and justice.   While a policy analyst at the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, Karen created and drafted the nation’s first legal consumer protections in divorce that became Part 1400 Rules for New York matrimonial attorneys — the original Statement of Client Rights that all New York divorce attorneys are required to provide to their clients. She has conducted fact investigations in California, Ohio, South Carolina and elsewhere to ferret out government misconduct in the family law arena.

Karen is the nationally-acclaimed author of Divorced From Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges  – published by ReganBooks/HarperCollins. Her book was endorsed by famed trial attorney Gerry Spence and U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler). She has served as an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, teaching business law and a unique course she developed: Financial Fraud in Divorce.

Her progressive work and reforms have helped achieve  greater accountability and transparency in the family law courts. She is also a recognized expert in lawyer-client fee disputes.

In 2018, Karen fought and won against a national law firm who had taken a lien for $800,000 against a client’s home in Scarsdale, New York for legal fees the Firm alleged their former client owed for handling her divorce. The Firm had committed misconduct and Winner found it.   See the Court’s decision here. Karen’s win was full circle, because the very rules the Court ruled the Firm had violated, were the very same rules Karen Winner had conceived and drafted before she became a lawyer, that were initiated in New York as sweeping reforms to curb lawyer abuse of clients.