Karen A. Hammer LL.M.
Hammer-Law
Karen A. Hammer, Esq., LL.M., is a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law and received an advanced law degree with honors in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown University Law Center. At Georgetown, she studied international project finance with senior lawyers from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Hammer has lawyered for prominent boutique firms and has held senior legal positions within industry leading companies and quasi-governmental organizations. These experiences inform Hammer’s understanding of how individuals, businesses, lawyers, and others make active and passive choices that lead to litigation. Similar choices lead to ethics violations.
Hammer serves as a mediator and also facilitates transactional and political negotiations and settlements. She is admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, the Tenth Circuit, the District of Colorado, and Colorado state courts.
Hammer has individually been approved as a Continuing Legal Education sponsor by the Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of Continuing Legal and Judicial Education. She regularly writes and provides CLE programs on professionalism, as well as ethics and other substantive law topics.
LEGAL ETHICS AND PROFESSIONALISM: Hammer is Co-Secretary of the Colorado Bar Association (CBA) Ethics Committee and Chairs the CBA Ethics Hotline responding to ethics inquiries from attorneys. She served on a task force that developed and implemented a free / low-bono assistance program for income-qualifying attorneys facing potential discipline by the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel (OARC). Hammer is also the former Secretary of the CBA-Denver Bar Association Professionalism Coordinating Council of judges and lawyers.
Hammer was appointed by the Colorado Supreme Court to the Hearing Board Panel for the Office of Presiding Disciplinary Judge. Her dissent in People v. Betterton-Fike led to a recent reversal by the Colorado Supreme Court that discouraged the use of the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel as the tool of choice for debt collection against attorneys.
Hammer was one of four attorneys interviewed for the position of Colorado's Attorney Regulation Counsel in 2018. She insisted on confidentiality when Colorado developed its first-in-the-nation lawyer self-assessment program developed by the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel for the Colorado Supreme Court. Hammer was one of three people selected to lead the development of the competency portion of the lawyer self-assessment.
While practicing in Washington, D.C., Hammer was appointed to the White House and Congressional Conference on Character Building in Education.
Hammer is former Chair of the Boulder County Bar Association's Business Law Section; former Co-Chair of the District of Columbia Bar Association’s Real Estate, Housing, and Land Use Section; member, invitation-only Senior Women Corporate Counsel; member, Faculty of Federal Advocates.
DISASTER LEADERSHIP: Hammer is a leader in developing evidence-based psycho-education programs for first responders, public health professionals, and mental health clinical supervisors to understand, cope with, and work through chronic disaster and professional stress issues. She is a leader in the disaster-focused Medical Reserve Corps of Boulder County through Boulder County Public Health, co-chairing the Special Projects workgroup with her Hammer-Law colleague Barbara K. Brown, Ph.D., and serving on the Advisory Council. Hammer has been named Volunteer of the Year.
(11/22)
