The Law Dork Nine: Robbie Kaplan

The Kaplan Hecker & Fink founding partner talks with Law Dork about Moscow, Elon Musk, and Oh, Mary!

Welcome to The Law Dork Nine!

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I am starting this feature as a kind of thank you to paid subscribers. Independent legal journalism is essential, and I bring you the latest news, the biggest developments, and the stories others miss several times a week here at Law Dork. Paid subscriptions are necessary to make that work — which is available to everyone — sustainable. Simply put, paid subscribers make Law Dork possible. This is a small effort to let paid subscribers know how much I appreciate your financial support.

This is also a great way for me to get people doing notable work in the legal world to answer some questions about their work and their life that I think will prompt some interesting responses. (An early thing I learned about journalism is that it’s a perfect excuse to ask anyone basically anything!)

For the inaugural edition of The Law Dork Nine, I went back to my roots — and to a lawyer who I first met when I was a practicing lawyer in Ohio and who has remained an important figure in my life, and on the national stage, in the years since: Roberta Kaplan.

Kaplan is likely best known across the country today for her representation of E. Jean Carroll — including her deposition of Donald Trump in connection with that case. She is also a key litigator for LGBTQ rights, having been Edie Windsor’s lawyer in Windsor’s successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act. She also has worked on several other important cases addressing LGBTQ issues throughout her career, both before and since United States v. Windsor. (I most recently mentioned Kaplan’s LGBTQ representation in connection with the settlement in Florida over the Parental Rights in Education Act, aka, the “Don’t Say Gay” law.)

We talked on Friday, when she was back in the Buckeye State, for her take on The Law Dork Nine.

1. How do you wish to be identified for this?

Robbie. Definitely Robbie.

2. What is your work?

I am a lawyer by trade. And I, in 2017, I started a law firm called Kaplan Hecker & Fink.

3. How does your work relate to the law?

A lot of people ask me that question all the time. I like to think, because I think it's true, that what we do for a living in our law firm is that we represent clients in legal disputes, citing law, and that we're always right. Our clients are always right. Judges might not always agree with that, but that’s our sense of it.

4. What job or experience that you've had has most shaped your worldview?

This one’s a little more serious. For me, believe it or not, it was a semester I spent in Moscow, my junior year in college — a very, very long time ago. A little bit of context, that was the spring of 1987, glasnost had been announced as an official policy by Gorbachev who was the head of the Russian government — actually, the Soviet government, but it really hadn't changed much, all kinds of remnants of the old stuff, the Soviet Communist, totalitarian system persisted.