Meet Danny Karon: ‘Your Lovable Lawyer’

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Danny Karon is a class action lawyer. That’s not anything too out of the ordinary, but he’s not just any lawyer — he’s “Your Lovable Lawyer”

It’s part of his brand, actually. In addition to practicing law at his Cleveland-based firm, Karon LLC, he runs a website called yourlovablelawyer.com, which focuses on offering “legal wellness” tips in easy-to-understand videos.

And he’s not just “lovable” on his website. Even lawyers who have been his opponent in the courtroom like him.

“One of the reasons we work together well is we are going to disagree strenuously on the big issues, but he’s not one to get into some of the drama, some of the posturing on small issues that just distract from the merits of the case,” Greg Farkas, another attorney at a different Cleveland-based firm, said of Karon.

Farkas is often on the defense side of things, while Karon typically represents plaintiffs in class action lawsuits. So Farkas means it when he says Karon is easy to work with — he’s talking about someone who’s almost always on the other side of the courtroom.

“We have been on the opposite side of a number of class actions over close to 20 years at this point, 15 or 20,” Farkas said.

Karon, an occasional Top Class Actions source and a columnist for Law360, has been working in law, mostly working for class action plaintiffs — though recently, also for class action defendants — for almost exactly three decades. He’s seen a lot of changes in that time, he said.

Karon said practicing class action law turned out to be much different than what he thought it would be when he first started.

“It’s harder,” he said. “It’s more competitive. It’s harder to get paid. Laws are more restrictive, less forgiving. People (considering a career in class actions) should think a little harder and a bit longer than they did maybe 30 years ago.”

But that doesn’t mean he regrets anything, or that the job isn’t worthwhile for him, he said.

“It’s something important to do, and if we’re not going to do it, who is?” he said. “There are rights that require vindication and people who deserve help, and that’s why I’ve continued doing it even though it’s gotten tougher.”

Karon, 55, hails from St. Paul, Minnesota. His parents are still in the area, splitting time between Minneapolis and Scottsdale. He went to Indiana University for his bachelor’s degree and then to Ohio State University for law school. After receiving his law degree, he started off working for a big, Chicago-based firm, where one of his primary duties was to comb through documents. Karon was at that firm for about eight years, but said he hated all of it — he wanted to do so much more than just look through stacks of papers.

“I think they kind of hated me, too,” he said. “I always wanted to give and grow and do and help and teach and commit and problem solve and add real value, and I was always told just to go look at documents, and that didn’t work for me.”

This was no secret to other people he worked with. Vincent Esades, who worked at a different firm than Karon but often ended up going through documents on the same cases in the same cities during the 1990s, remembers how Karon felt.

“Danny is a hustler, and in a good way,” Esades said. “He was bumping heads right out of the gate with people at his firm because he wanted to do more than just be a box lawyer and a document lawyer.”

For example, Esades said Karon would often try to edit legal briefs in a way that would allow judges to understand them better. That didn’t necessarily sit well with the people he was working with.

“A judge wouldn’t want to read the stuff the senior attorneys had written. Danny knew this, had researched everything and would offer edits to the senior lawyers’ so the briefs would communicate better,” Esades said. “He would get such grief, and they’d insist on keeping the blurry stuff as opposed to getting right to the meat of an argument. He’d encourage better writing and better advocacy because that was an objectively better way to do it.”

Once he left the Chicago firm, Karon ended up moving to Cleveland, where his wife was from, to raise his family — he has two children, a daughter who just graduated from American University and a son who’s just starting there.

While working in Chicago, Karon met some lawyers from Philadelphia and began partnering with them in Cleveland, and that worked for 13 years but, as Karon describes, “it ran its course,” and he started his own law firm.

That, for him, was a pretty scary decision.

“I said wow, what am I gonna do now?” Karon said. “I think I just quit my own firm. But I didn’t call my wife right away. Instead, I called my dad, who’d been in practice for almost 50 years, from large firm to solo shop, first. If I recall, he was golfing. I said to him, ‘hey dad, I just quit my firm.'”

And when Karon asked his dad to join his new firm, his dad agreed.

“My dad said ‘if you want to go in together, let’s do it,’” Karon said. “And with that, I immediately gained peace of mind and comfort.” Next, Karon called his wife. And what she said to him was reassuring.

“All she said was, ‘what took you so long?’” Karon said.

That was eight years ago. Now that Karon has his own firm, he loves the independence. But of course, there are lots of challenges to being on your own, he said.

Working at a larger firm, he could count on getting a paycheck every two weeks. That’s not the nearly the case at the firm that he’s running.

“I know lawyers at larger firms have their issues with clients paying them and office politics, but my stomach churns over the big issues like, ‘am I going to be able to pay my mortgage or for my kids’ school?’ When’s the next payday coming? Is the judge going to approve that fee? If she doesn’t, defense counsel still gets paid,” Karon said. “That’s the difference between getting paid per hour versus getting paid perhaps.”

Working in class action law itself comes with its positives and negatives, too, Karon said.

“I really love getting good results and making people happy and giving people a check who deserve it because they’re owed money for something that was stolen from them,” Karon said. “There’s no better feeling than that.”

On the flip side, Karon said there’s nothing worse than watching something like a Supreme Court ruling or another law upend an avenue he had relied on to get consumers their money — something that has happened a few times in his decades in practice.

“I remember, I had a slam dunk, dead to rights, indescribably indefensible case against a cell phone company for slipping secret charges into peoples’ cell phone bills,” Karon said of a case from about a decade ago. “Without jinxing it, of course, we felt great about the case.”

Then, when he was very close to a settlement, the Supreme Court issued its 2011 decision in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, a case in which the court’s conservative majority ruled that companies can compel individual out-of-court arbitration in place of class actions, effectively gutting the settlement Karon had been working on.

“We limped out of there with peanuts after having spent years trying to do right by people who themselves got peanuts,” Karon said.

When he’s not busy fighting cases such as those, Karon is making videos for his website, yourlovablelawyer.com — something he said he started doing out of a need to offer legal awareness to people who often can’t access it.

Some of his recent videos explain the legality of COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates. He also has made videos about topics as disparate as jaywalking laws, jury duty, and who’s at fault if someone gets hit with a ball at a baseball game. 

He also teaches law school at the University of Michigan and previously taught at Columbia University. Next semester, he begins teaching at his alma mater, Ohio State. On top of that, he chairs the ABA’s National Institute on Class Actions, writes a column for Law360 and is working on a novel — about a lawyer, of course.

While he still enjoys practicing law, he said he’s not convinced he wants to keep doing it until he’s 70. “I’ve got so many other interests, so that’s just fine,” he said.

“All my side projects are really fun and it’s difficult finding time to do all of them. Who knows what they’ll lead to. After all, the only certainty is in doing nothing,” Karon said. “I’m just interested in so many things that spring from the same source — the law, writing, thinking, teaching and adding creative value and content. I guess my goal is to simply help as many people as I can.”

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