In 18 days as a federal judge, Karen Gren Scholer has hired two law clerks, an administrative executive, received 300 civil cases transferred from other judges, conducted conflicts checks on all of them, issued orders for status conferences for more than 100 pending lawsuits, conducted hearings in 55 separate cases and set her first two lawsuits for trial in the next six weeks.
This week, Judge Scholer has set status conferences for nearly 50 more cases. She also will be part of the specialized patent and intellectual property docket that has been set up in the Northern District of Texas.
When U.S. Chief District Judge Barbara Lynn gave Judge Scholer the oath of office on March 7, the Northern District of Texas got its first new federal judge in more than a decade. The district, because of its burgeoning caseload and dwindling resources, has been identified by the Federal Judicial Conference as a “judicial emergency.”
“My goal was for me to hit the ground running and it has been crazy busy,” Judge Scholer said in an exclusive interview Sunday with The Texas Lawbook from her new chambers on the 16th floor of the Earle Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas. “We have massive amounts of work – and important work – that needs to be done.
“The biggest challenge we face is making sure that justice is served and served on a timely basis,” she said.
Born in Japan, Scholer and her family came to the U.S. by ship when she was four years old with her family. Her father was a decorated paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne who received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for his service in World War II. Her mother came from a prominent Japanese family and was a homemaker.
She went to Richardson High School in Dallas and then college at Rice University, where she majored in legal studies and political science. She graduated from Cornell Law School in 1982 and went to work as an attorney at Strasburger & Price, where she specialized in products liability defense.
“For someone who thought I would be okay just being a waitress, I could not believe the money that law firms were going to pay me,” she said. “I have come to love the law business and the law itself.”
Strasburger made Scholer a partner in 1989. In 1996, she joined Andrews Kurth, where she remained until she became a state district judge in Dallas County in 2001 – a position she held for eight years. In 2009, she joined Jones Day as a partner in its litigation section. For the past five years, she has practiced commercial litigation at Carter Scholer Arnett in Dallas, including the final three years as co-managing partner.
“Karen is as genuine as they come,” FleetPride General Counsel Baron Oursler told The Texas Lawbook. “She’s over-prepared for every task. She has a fundamental sense of fairness and justice.
“FleetPride will miss her legal counsel, but the people of North Texas are the beneficiaries of a great new federal judge.”
In March 2016, President Obama nominated Scholer to a seat on the federal bench in the Eastern District of Texas in Plano. The U.S. Senate, however, did not vote on her nomination before Obama left office.
Last September, President Trump re-nominated Scholer, but this time the appointment was for the Northern District in Dallas.
“I may be the most vetted judicial candidate in Texas history,” Judge Scholer said. “My previous married name was Karen Johnson, and do you know how many Karen Johnsons there are? Whoopi Goldberg’s real name is Karen Johnson. Hundreds of them. I think I was asked if I was all of them.
“But they also found things that I never thought would have been possible to find,” she said.
For example, investigators for the U.S. Department of Justice unearthed a document from Judge Scholer’s college days at Rice in the late 1970s.
Women from a rival dorm had raided Scholer’s dorm and stolen all of their toilet paper. In retaliation, Scholer’s dorm stormed the opponent’s home, took their tooth brushes and planted them as a memorial at a nearby statue with shampoo bottles decorated all around.
“I didn’t actually go into the other women’s dorm, but I might have – allegedly – been involved in the conspiracy to do so,” she said. “Don’t worry – I checked – the statute of limitations has passed.”
Scholer and her dorm mates were required to write an apology letter back then, and that letter is one of 600 pages of attachments filed in the U.S. Senate record regarding her confirmation.
“It is fair warning to future federal judges: don’t bother trying to cover anything up because they will find out,” she said. “This is where living a pretty boring life has paid off for me.”
With support from both Texas senators, the Senate confirmed her nomination 95-0 on March 5. Two days later, Chief Judge Lynn swore her into the office, making Scholer the first ever Asian-American to serve as a U.S. District judge in Texas.
“I have received a tremendous amount of support from my colleagues, judges, the bar and our two senators,” Judge Scholer said. “I don’t intend to let them down.
“I’m going to try very hard to be the kind of judge I wanted to see on the bench when I was representing clients in the courtroom,” she said.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee gave its approval of Scholer, she started attending sentencing hearings conducted by Chief Judge Lynn and District Judges Sidney Fitzwater and Jane Boyle. In the meantime, she was flooded with applications from those wanting to be her first law clerks.
“There were a massive number of résumés from law students, practicing associates – even some law firm partners and corporate in-house lawyers,” she said.
Within hours of becoming a federal judge, Judge Scholer received a visit from Karen Mitchell, who is the clerk of the court for the Northern District.
“Karen was amazing – she had the HR folks, the IT folks, the U.S. Marshals, everyone gathered and ready to move for me,” Judge Scholer said. “I remember she asked me what chambers or courtroom I wanted, and I said that I don’t care if I get a closet. I just wanted to get to work.”
Judge Scholer chose the chambers of recently retired U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis on the 16th floor.
“Judge [Ed] Kinkeade calls it the penthouse,” she said.
Judge Scholer, working with Mitchell, quickly named two law clerks: Victoria Bliss, a new associate at Jones Day, and Blair Watler, an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Bliss and Watler were part of Teach For America, a program committed to working in low-income neighborhood schools. Watler is the daughter of prominent First Amendment and news media lawyer Paul Watler, a partner at Jackson Walker.
Federal judges in the Northern District of Texas have the choice of hiring three law clerks or two clerks and an administrative director. Judge Scholer chose the latter and rehired Jennifer Graig, her former executive assistant while she was a state court judge, to be her courtroom deputy.
“I plan to be very active in the community, so I needed help with the administrative matters, which is why I need Jennifer,” Judge Scholer said.
Close friends say Judge Scholer is ferocious in her commitment to community service.
“Karen has mentored hundreds of women – I am not exaggerating – especially Asian-American women who had no other professional role models,” said TIAA Associate General Counsel Caren Lock. “She personally helped shaped me and so many other Asian women into leaders. She has repeatedly gone out of her way to reach out to us and pull us up.
“Karen is an all-around good egg,” Lock said. “It is meaningful for the rest of the country to see Texas as a diverse state.”
Within hours of Scholer becoming a federal judge, the other jurists in the Northern District started transferring some of their civil docket – between 28 and 45 cases each – to Judge Scholer. She spent March 8 and 9 reviewing each of the 300 cases for possible conflicts.
On Monday, March 12, Judge Scholer dusted off her old state judge’s robe and swore in her new law clerks. By the end of that day, she started issuing orders scheduling status hearings to hundreds of lawyers involved in the dozens of cases on her new docket.
She conducted 18 hearings on March 15 and 16 and then 37 more status conferences last week. Nearly 50 hearings are set for this week. The biggest of the cases assigned to Judge Scholer is a massive False Claims Act case seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages against Bank of America, Citibank, Compass Bank, Frost Bank and JPMorgan Chase.
“I’m a big believer in early and active participation in a case by a judge,” she said. “A handful of cases actually settled when we notified them that we wanted to schedule a hearing.
“None of the parties in the 55 cases we’ve handled so far have left my courtroom without a plan or a path forward in their cases,” she said.