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Claire Wright, Esq.

Claire practices in the area of international trade law and specializes in World Trade Organization (WTO) matters. Previously, she was a partner and the Director of the WTO Center at Ernst & Young LLP as well as a partner in the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie. She has 15 years of experience in the international trade law field.

In the WTO area, she advises companies and government regarding the various WTO agreements affecting goods, services, investment measures, and intellectual property rights. For example, she advises companies and governments regarding the legality of various subsidies offered to companies by governments. In this regard, she has assisted a number of companies to understand the WTO's recent decisions to strike down the Foreign Sales Corporation Program in the U.S. as an illegal export subsidy. Given China's new membership in the WTO, she currently is assisting numerous companies with respect to market access issues in China.

In addition, she lobbies foreign governments to abolish particular trade restrictions and thereby grant access to their markets on the ground that those restrictions violate one or another of the WTO Agreements. For example, she has lobbied the Thai Government to lower its duty rate on coffee beans in accordance with the tariff reduction commitments that it made under the GATT 1994 Agreement. She has also lobbied various South American and Asian Governments to amend their local intellectual property protection laws so as to make those laws more compliant with the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (the TRIPS Agreement).

As an adjunct professor, Claire has taught courses on the international trade laws at Stanford Law School and at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California in San Diego. She is also admitted to legal practice in California and is a member of the State Bar of California.