Described by The Washington Post 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,” Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, co-founder of Kaplan Martin LLP, is a nationally renowned litigator and trial attorney. She is a fierce and creative advocate who consistently achieves results for her clients.
Fortune 50 boards and high-profile CEOs have Robbie on speed dial. She regularly represents plaintiffs and defendants in commercial, employment, and regulatory matters, along with maintaining one of the most diverse and celebrated civil rights, higher-education, employment, public interest, and political law practices in the country. Robbie represents other Benchmark-ranked firms and some of the most powerful institutions in the financial services, technology, entertainment, consumer products, and media industries in connection with their commercial, insurance, shareholder, and employment matters. She regularly is entrusted with conducting sensitive internal investigations and defending individuals and companies facing legal, regulatory, and reputational challenges.
Robbie began her legal career at Paul, Weiss, where she made partner in just seven years. While at Paul, Weiss, Robbie helped secure federal recognition of same-sex marriage through the historic Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor. In 2017, she filed a high-stakes lawsuit against twenty-four neo-Nazi and white supremacist entities and individuals responsible for organizing the racial and religious-based violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. After a four-week trial, Robbie and her team secured a landmark $26 million verdict against the defendants.
In the past two years alone, Robbie has prevailed in some of the country’s most consequential litigations. She successfully defended the MTA in at least 14 separate lawsuits seeking to block New York’s congestion pricing program and scored two major legal victories against the Trump Administration’s efforts to withhold billions in earmarked infrastructure funding from the MTA; defeated multiple efforts by President Donald Trump at the Second Circuit and Supreme Court to appeal two unanimous jury verdicts against him for the sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll; advised Altana Wealth, a leading asset management and hedge fund firm in connection with protecting its investments in Senior Secured Notes issued by Venezuela; and began representing Jay-Z in a high-profile lawsuit against two attorneys who defamed and attempted to exploit him for money. These matters represent just a fraction of Robbie’s current cases, which also include consequential confidential employment, discrimination, and sexual assault cases.
Robbie is a long-time lecturer at Columbia University Law School and has won, among many other awards, “Litigator of the Year” by The American Lawyer, the Lifetime Achievement Award and “Attorney of the Year” from the New York Law Journal, and Most Innovative Lawyer of the Year from the Financial Times. Chambers has designated Robbie a “Star Individual” in General Commercial Litigation and she is ranked in Band 1 in Higher Education Law and Labor & Employment: Mainly Plaintiffs.
- Class action
- Commercial
- Commercial and transactions
- Commercial disputes
- Dispute resolution
- Government and regulatory
- Plaintiff
- Private client
- J.D., Columbia University, 1991
- B.A., Harvard University, 1988
- New York
- U.S. Supreme Court
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits
- U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Eastern District of New York, and
- Northern District of New York
- Massachusetts