Karen Holden
Founder of A City Law Firm & Female Founders Growth Program
Karen is a disrupter in her space and earnt her Freedom of the City as a top 100 women for equality work.
She set up her legal practice in the City 15yrs ago, during a recession , a male dominated sector and area, its now an award winning Legal 500 disruptive firm.
She was invited and given Freedom of the City in 2018 for her work for Equality for LGBT and Women due to her reported cases , changing the law, supporting charities and donating free time to give talks and free clinics.
She launched her Female Founders program as she is committed & passionate to help them rapidly grow, seek investment and prove to the UK more money and effort needs to be invested in female led businesses.
The program was launched with an exception turn out of 96 people and included 65 partners, talks, workshops, pitching and investment panel and 3 secured investments provided.
She is dedicating her time for free to launch something to genuinely offer commercial, legal and practical support to women without taking equity.
She has entirely self-funded this project.
She runs a dynamic female led law firm which works with founders across all sectors, as well as entrepreneurs , high net worth clients and international accelerators. We have won awards for innovation, modern law and alternative law such as AI, VR, flying cars & drones, blockchain to the flip side surrogacy, HIV discrimination and modern equality rights.
She won in 2022 Female Champion Award from Wearethecity, Top 100 SME by Elite Business and so many more.
She has spoken at the house of commons on GDPR; was invited to 10 Downing Street for her award as an innovator ; she speaks at many accelerators , universities and LBC to podcasts.
She is honest about her working class council estate upbringing - working full time whilst studying part time due to financial circumstances , leading to a Masters at Cambridge , LPC from the College of Law and now her own profitable law firm.
She started with 5k and a handful of files and slowly grew.
She fell pregnant whilst running the business but managed for it to still thrive and so now supports fellow parents with hybrid working and preferential leave and hours.
She is open about her journey and mistakes made and learnt from like £79,000 of credit for salaries as extended too much credit to clients to how now she has created a fully paperless, able remote firm that does 90% on fixed fees and monthly payment plans that was active before Covid 19.
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