Jeffrey Kaplan is a partner in Kaplan & Walker LLP, a law firm in Princeton, New Jersey and Santa Monica, California. He specializes in all aspects of assisting companies in developing, implementing and reviewing corporate compliance/ethics programs, including conducting risk analyses; writing/editing codes of conduct and other policy documents; counseling companies in matters regarding training; developing compliance audit protocols and reporting systems; establishing compliance/ethics offices; and assisting boards of directors in meeting their fiduciary duties under the Caremark case. Mr. Kaplan's compliance/ethics program practice has included work for clients in the health care, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, government contracting, insurance, manufacturing, energy, retail, paper, publishing, professional services, telecommunications, technology, securities, private investments, food and chemical fields, as well as non-profit organizations. He serves as a compliance monitor in a criminal tax case for the New York County District Attorney, has reviewed and reported to the Department of Justice and SEC on a company's compliance/ethics program in connection with the settlement of an FCPA investigation and has reviewed and reported to a state attorney general on another company's compliance/ethics program in connection with a settlement of another matter. He also conducts internal investigations on behalf of boards and companies into allegations of wrongdoing brought by whistleblowers and others and practices in the areas of regulatory and white-collar criminal defense. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Carleton College in 1976 and his J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard University in 1980. He is a former partner of Chadbourne & Parke, where he served in the Special Litigation Group, and also a former partner of Arkin Kaplan & Cohen LLP and of Stier Anderson, LLC.
For many years Mr. Kaplan was Counsel to the Ethics Officer Association (now the ECOA), a professional association of more than 1200 compliance/ethics officers. He now serves as the Program Director of the ECOA's 'law school" for compliance/ethics officers and in 2011 conducted a C&E program benchmarking survey of ECOA members. He has also served as Program Director for the Conference Board's annual Business Ethics conference and its Council on Corporate Compliance and has co-authored two research reports for that organization: Ethics Programs - The Role of the Board: A Global Study and Ethics and Compliance Enforcement Decisions - the Information Gap (both with Ronald Berenbeim). In 2009 he was a recipient of a Compliance and Ethics Award from the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics, which that organization bestows annually on "Compliance and Ethics Champions."
Mr. Kaplan is, together with Joe Murphy and Win Swenson, co-editor of Compliance Programs and the Corporate Sentencing Guidelines: Preventing Criminal and Civil Liability (West 1993), a leading legal treatise on designing and implementing compliance/ethics programs. He is co-author of The Prevention and Prosecution of Computer and High Technology Crime (Matthew Bender 1989). He was for many years co-publisher/executive editor of ethikos, a bimonthly magazine for compliance/ethics professionals. Mr. Kaplan is author and co-author of numerous articles about business crime and compliance/ethics programs in periodicals such as The California Management Review, The Journal of Securities and Commodities Regulation, The Prevention of Corporate Liability: Current Report, The Preventive Law Reporter, Directorship, Director's Monthly, American Banker, Business Crime Commentary, the New York Law Journal and the National Law Journal, and also various book chapters on these topics. He is a frequent speaker on compliance/ethics issues for the Practicing Law Institute; has, for many years, chaired the Continuing Legal Education program in corporate compliance sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; is the Featured Risk Assessment Columnist for the Corporate Compliance Insights web site; and is editor of the Conflict of Interest Blog.
Mr. Kaplan is Adjunct Professor of Business Ethics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and is a member of the New York and New Jersey bars.