Gilbert Kaplan

Gil Kaplan is a partner at King & Spalding and practices International Trade law. His practice focuses on international trade cases, international negotiations, and trade policy issues. Mr. Kaplan filed and prosecuted the first successful countervailing duty (anti-subsidy) case ever against China, in 2007. He is the founder of the Conference on the Renaissance of American Manufacturing. He is also the founder of The Manufacturing Policy Initiative ("MPI") at Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the first and only university program in the country that focuses on what public policy steps should be taken to preserve and revitalize U.S. manufacturing. 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. He has worked extensively on Rules Negotiation issues in the 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.