Karen has more than two decades of experience in valuation and financial consulting, helping organizations in industries such as aerospace, defense, manufacturing, retail, technology, education, entertainment, financial services, and energy value businesses, securities, and intangible assets.
About Karen
For over two decades, Karen has collaborated with clients to value their organizations and securities, as well as to provide analysis and counsel on strategies to maximize value. Her experience includes fairness opinions, capital adequacy opinions, solvency opinions, purchase price allocations, goodwill impairment analyses, valuations for transactions, financings, gift and estate tax planning, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), and litigation.
Karen has consulted on ownership transition issues and liquidity alternatives. She has testified as an expert witness in depositions and trials and has served as a court-appointed referee.
Throughout her career, Karen has:
- Led the valuation team preparing a purchase price allocation for a $3 billion take-private acquisition of a defense/government contractor by a financial sponsor. The valuation covered multiple reporting units, trade names, developed technology, multiple customer categories, and real and personal property.
- Managed the fresh start accounting analysis for a national retailer, with hundreds of locations, that was emerging from bankruptcy, with an emergence value of about $900 million. The valuation included brand names, leases, customer relationship, inventory and goodwill, and allocations of assets across multiple reporting units.
- Helped a publicly traded energy business with a tax restructuring by valuing 100 separate internal and domestic legal entities.
- Valued a multibillion-dollar privately held conglomerate with legal entities in publishing, entertainment, and education for both redemptions of shareholders’ interests and estate tax purposes. The analysis involved international entities and the consideration of multilayered discounts, built-in capital gains, pension liabilities, and restricted stock.
- Provided capital adequacy opinions for a publicly traded software industry business in connection with a redemption of its preferred securities and, at a subsequent date, for its proposed stock repurchases.
- Valued an indefinite-lived, customer-related intangible asset for a publicly traded financial services business for impairment testing under both generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
Before Huron, Karen served as a managing director and the leader of the financial and valuation advisory practice for Houlihan Lokey in Southern California. She also held the role of principal at a Big Four accounting firm in its economic and financial consulting division and financial analyst at a Fortune 500 corporation.
Karen earned a Bachelor of Arts in business administration at the University of Southern California and a Master of Business Administration at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is a certified public accountant (CPA) and holds the Accredited in Business Valuation (ABV) credential. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
In both 2019 and 2020, Karen was named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Top Women in Banking list. Additionally, she was named to the journal’s Leaders of Influence in Investment Banking List in 2020, and the Los Angeles Times recognized her as a Banking and Finance Visionary in 2021. Karen guest lectured for the mergers and acquisitions program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She has spoken on M&A- and valuation-related topics at the American Society of Appraisers’ Los Angeles Fair Value Conference and the WorldatWork Total Rewards Conference as well as events sponsored by the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) and CommNexus.
Karen writes frequently on the subject of valuation, including “Business Valuations,” a chapter in Litigation Services Handbook: The Role of the Financial Expert, Third Edition.