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 has represented
clients in a wide range of cases on antidumping (price discrimination), countervailing
duties (subsidies), Section 337, (intellectual property infringement) and other
trade matters. He also advises clients on trade policy and legislative matters,
as well as trade negotiations such as those involving the WTO. Mr. Kaplan recently
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, The Deseret Morning News, and The
Peninsula, Qatar’s leading English Daily newspaper.
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 for Import
Administration, and the deputy assistant secretary for Import Administration
of 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 cellular mobile telephones, steel and steel related products, textiles
and apparel and a variety of semiconductor and high-technology products.
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 pertaining
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. He worked extensively with congressional committees
and U.S. trade representative officials to craft the final language in the
GATT Implementing Bill, which was signed by President Clinton in 1994 and traveled
to Geneva to meet with GATT officials and negotiators. He has worked extensively
on Rules Negotiations issues in the current Doha Round, having travelled repeatedly
to Geneva in connection with these negotiations and having been one of the
few non-Governmental representatives from the U. S. in Doha, Qatar for the
kick-off of these negotiations in 2001.
Mr. Kaplan graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Harvard
Law School, cum laude.