Karen migrated to New Zealand in 2001 but was born and raised in Malaysia.  For many years, Karen accompanied her developer dad to construction sites in Asia, learning “useful” life-skills such as how to spot honeycombed concrete and identify the rank of a construction worker based on the colour of their hardhat.  Karen would have followed in her dad’s footsteps, but her grades in Physics were never as good as her grades in Math, so she ended up in project finance raising capital to fund construction projects instead.  She crunched numbers for around 10 years but when the Asian construction boom lost momentum, Karen wanted a new challenge, so she decided to pursue a career in law (specifically litigation and advocacy).

Karen returned to study law at the University of Auckland and graduated with a Prime Minister’s Scholarship and Honours in 2018.  After being admitted, she practiced as a junior Barrister and appeared at all levels of Senior Courts including successfully opposing a leave to appeal application in the Supreme Court.  Although most matters that came her way were general commercial matters, Karen remained passionate about construction law and when the opportunity arose to join Axis Construction Law, she seized it! In her free time, Karen tries to instil the love of science and construction in her infant son and keeps her developer dad “out of trouble” by giving him informal legal advice (she still refuses to help him sue the Malaysian government, not least because he expects her to do it pro bono).  Karen is also training to become an arbitrator and mediator and studying towards an LLM.  She really enjoys working at Axis Construction Law and hearing about her colleague David’s latest flatpack flops.    

Let’s talk today.

Karen Chia En Chow
Consultant 

Phone: 09 242 2044 (0800 AXIS LAW) 
Email: Get in touch