Roberta "Robbie" Kaplan, Advisory Board Member

Roberta A. (“Robbie”) Kaplan is a renowned litigator with decades of experience in commercial, higher education, and civil rights litigation. Chambers has described her as “a modern-day legal giant. A towering intellect and a genius in court, with the instincts of a street fighter.” Robbie has the distinction of beating Donald J. Trump, twice, in her representation of writer E. Jean Carroll, who obtained jury verdicts of $5 million and $83.3 million for sexual battery and defamation.

Robbie represented Edith Windsor in United States v. Windsor, which invalidated a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act. Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School said he could not “think of any Supreme Court decision in history that has ever created so rapid and broad a lower-court groundswell in a single direction.” Following a four-week trial, Robbie obtained a landmark $26 million verdict on behalf of her clients against neo-Nazi and white supremacists responsible for organizing violence in Charlottesville. Robbie obtained a historic settlement agreement with Florida that effectively nullified the most dangerous and discriminatory impacts of the State’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Most recently, Robbie represented the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in fending off ten separate challenges to New York’s groundbreaking congestion pricing program.

Sharon Nelles, head of litigation at Sullivan & Cromwell, is quoted in a profile explaining that Robbie “just sees things from a thousand different angles all at once, it’s hard to keep up with her thought processes. She knows her law cold, she knows the Constitution cold and she’s not afraid, if she sees a problem, to go figure out some law that’s going to allow her to fix it. She’ll find it.” Stephen Gillers, professor at New York University School of Law, told Bloomberg Law that Robbie is “a lawyer that you don’t want to see opposing you.” The Washington Post has described Robbie as “a brash and original strategist, with neither a gift for patience nor silence, a crusader for underdogs who has won almost every legal accolade imaginable.”

Robbie has consistently been listed as one of the top litigators and women litigators in the country, as well as in New York. She has been named to Forbes’ “America’s Top 200 Lawyers,” as the 2020 “Attorney of the Year” by the New York Law Journal, as “Litigator of the Year” by The American Lawyer, “Lawyer of the Year” by Above the Law, and “Most Innovative Lawyer of the Year” by The Financial Times, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Law Journal.