Profile: Gilbert Kaplan

Trade and Customs

Biography: Trade & Customs

Gilbert Kaplan is a partner at King & Spalding LLP and part of the international trade group. His practice focuses on international trade cases, trade policy issues and intellectual property issues. He has represented clients in a wide range of cases on anti-dumping (price discrimination), countervailing duties (subsidies), section 337 (intellectual property infringement) and other trade matters. He also advises clients on matters related to international transactions. He works extensively on market access, trade negotiation and export matters. Mr Kaplan also represents clients in connection with legislative and trade policy matters. He has represented the petitioner in the first two countervailing duty cases against China in which the US government made a finding of subsidisation.

Mr Kaplan recently published an article on section 337, The ITC or the District Court: Where To Protect Your International Intellectual Property, with Courtland Reichman (National Legal Center for the Public Interest, 2006).

From 1990 to 2004 he was a senior partner at Hale and Dorr, chairman of the government and regulatory affairs department, and headed the international trade group.

From 1983 to 1988, Mr Kaplan served in senior positions in the US government. He was the acting assistant secretary for import administration and the deputy assistant secretary for import administration of the US Department of Commerce. While there, he was in charge of administering the US anti-dumping and countervailing duty laws, and conducted over 500 related cases. These included cases on mobile telephones, steel and related products, pagers, semiconductors and other high-technology products.

Mr Kaplan supervised the US president's steel programme, the US-Japan agreement on trade in semiconductors, the US-Canada agreement on lumber and the machine tool programme.

Mr Kaplan received a JD degree from Harvard Law School and is a graduate of Harvard College.