Gil Kaplan
is a partner at King & Spalding and is in the International Trade Practice Group. His practice focuses on international trade cases and trade policy issues. He represents clients in a wide range of cases on antidumping (price discrimination), countervailing duties (subsidies), and Section 337 (intellectual property infringement). He also advises clients on trade policy and legislative matters, as well as trade negotiations such as those involving the WTO and international anti-subsidy agreements. Mr. Kaplan filed and prosecuted the first successful countervailing duty (anti-subsidy) case ever against China, in 2007. He is also the founder of the Conference on the Renaissance of American Manufacturing.
Mr. Kaplan published a monograph on Section 337 cases at the International Trade Commission entitled “The ITC or the District Court? Where to Protect Your International Intellectual Property,” National Legal Center for the Public Interest, 2006. He also recently published an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post Outlook Section entitled, “5 Myths about the Death of the U. S. Factory,” which was republished, among other places, in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and The Peninsula, Qatar’s leading English Daily newspaper. Mr. Kaplan regularly writes on trade and manufacturing issues for a variety of publications, including The Huffington Post.
Mr. Kaplan served as the first President of the Committee to Support U. S. Trade Laws (CSUSTL), from 2010-2012. CSUSTL is an organization of companies, trade associations, unions and individuals dedicated to preserving and enhancing the U.S. trade remedy laws. 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 several senior positions in the U.S. government. He was the Acting Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Import Administration, at the U.S. Department of Commerce. While there, Mr. Kaplan was in charge of administering the U.S. antidumping and countervailing duty laws, and conducted over five hundred antidumping and countervailing duty cases. These included cases on agricultural products, steel products, textiles and apparel, and a variety of semiconductor and high-technology products.
While at the Department of Commerce, Mr. Kaplan supervised the President’s Steel Program, the U.S.-Japan Agreement on Trade in Semiconductors, the U.S.-Canada agreement on lumber and the machine tool program. In addition, he oversaw the foreign trade zones program, as well as the Office of Industrial Resource Administration, which develops and implements programs to ensure the availability of industrial resources to meet U.S. peacetime and emergency requirements. He was a principal spokesman for the administration on legislative and congressional issues related to the dumping, countervailing duty and National Security import relief (Section 232) laws.
Mr. Kaplan was also an active participant in the negotiation of the World Trade Organization Agreement. He testified before the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, as well as before the House and Senate GATT Task Forces, and traveled to Geneva to meet with GATT officials and negotiators. He worked extensively with congressional committees and U.S. Trade Representative officials to craft the final language in the WTO Implementing Bill, which was signed by President Clinton in 1994. Since then, he has worked extensively on Rules Negotiations issues in the current Doha Round, meeting regularly with senior negotiators in Geneva and having been one of the few non-Governmental representatives from the U.S. in Doha, Qatar for the kick-off of the Doha Round.
Mr. Kaplan graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Harvard Law School, cum laude.
