What does it mean to be a “two-time immigrant”? For Rippi Karda, associate general counsel at Verizon, it means immigrating from Punjab, India, to Toronto when she was two, and later journeying to become an attorney in the US by herself. What her family may have lacked in financial resources and professional mentors due to being the first in their family to immigrate to Canada, Karda has overcome these obstacles with an unprecedented career.
Since only 2019, Karada has amassed nearly two dozen awards, kicked off with the South Asian Bar of New Jersey’s “In-house Counsel of the Year” and most recently SABA-NJ’s “Trailblazer of the Year” and NAPABA’s “Women’s Leadership Award.” There are twenty other awards in the interim, along with other accommodations, like being appointed by Governor Phil Murphy as the Chair of the inaugural New Jersey AAPI Commission in 2022. Most recently, Karda says she’s incredibly proud to be the first South Asian to serve on the board of the Ronald McDonald House of NYC.
All that is to say, whatever Karda lacked in resources, she made up for with spirit, determination, and, admittedly, a little bit of a chip on her shoulder.
“As the eldest of three daughters, I think there was a bit of that patriarchal Indian upbringing present in my family,” the AGC recounts. “People would tell my parents it was sad that they didn’t have any sons, and I would think to myself, ‘Just watch. I’m going to excel and climb ladders that nobody else, man or woman, could.’ I wanted to change the narrative and the rhetoric, so no other young south Asian girl would have to hear that.”
Karda watched her parents, the first in their family to leave comfortable roots in India, struggle to provide for their family and other relatives they helped to bring abroad. She saw the sacrifice, and she felt an enormous amount of duty, obligation, and responsibility to honor what her parents did to provide for her and her sisters.
But it’s the way that Karda has gone about repaying that debt which is truly what defines her. She lives by the creed that as she rises, she will raise others up with her. Her efficacy in that capacity is best illustrated by the mounting strain the walls of her office must be under, having to hold up so many awards.
“I’m trying to be a person who pulls up others behind me, someone like Michelle Ifill, former SVP and deputy general counsel at Verizon,” Karda says. “I met her more than a decade ago, and she brought me into so many rooms that I didn’t have access to myself. She didn’t have to do much more than bring me in, but because she did, it gave me access to unprecedented opportunities. I want to be to other people what Michelle was for me.”
Karda has taken that mission to its logical extreme, her calling card, of sorts. She’s mentoring somewhere between twenty and twenty-five people at the moment, and she’s not entirely sure how much longer she can hold up this approach, her day-to-day duties at Verizon, and the seven other organizations she serves on at present withstanding. Just one of those additional projects is founding an “Attorney of the Week” series in 2020. She has singlehandedly run the operation since its founding, and has featured more than 275 attorneys worldwide to date.
“What I need to transition into is training the trainers,” Karda explains. “I need to start trusting the people I’ve mentored to go out into the world and pay it forward. It can be a positive sort of pyramid [laughs], a way to share these resources and opportunities that can provide me some more time to focus on helping others with a larger perspective in mind.”
Looking ahead, Karda says she would like to continue to stay at Verizon, where she has been for eleven years, because of the amazing people she has met, people she loves and spends time with outside of the office as well as the opportunities to learn and grow her career. And while she’s seemingly done it all, Karda doesn’t see it that way. If her time up to now has been this wonderful, imagine what she’s capable of in her next chapter.
The lawyer’s accomplishments look great on paper, but Karda says her life’s goals were perfectly summed up in two phone calls the day of her Modern Counsel interview. The first call came from a woman who had secured a role with an organization in which Karda had played a sort of matchmaker. It wasn’t a hard lift, but Karda found the outpouring of thanks and appreciation particularly moving and rewarding. She had played a part in helping find a great candidate a good home.
The second call was from her younger sister. She was in the car with Karda’s niece and nephew who had just spent a week with Karda in New Jersey. Karda’s sister, in a parental moment, was explaining the idea of a “paradise” and what that might look like for different people. The elder of the children, after understanding the definition, relayed that being with Rippi Masi (“Aunt Rippi” in Punjabi) at her home in New Jersey was his idea of paradise. Her young niece, only two, suggested they call their aunt and tell her just that.
“What more success could I want in my life than that?” Karda asks.
“Rippi’s expansive legal and business network is unmatched, but what truly sets her apart is her unwavering willingness to connect and uplift others, always leveraging her relationships to open doors and create meaningful opportunities.”
–Philip R. Sellinger, Co-Chair, Global Litigation; Founding Chair, New Jersey Office; Former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey
