Deborah Marcuse is Managing Partner of the New York Office of Sanford Heisler Kimpel, LLP, a national law firm with additional offices in Washington, DC and California. Ms. Marcuse received her law degree from Yale Law School in 2008.
Ms. Marcuse is Co-Chair with Felicia Medina of Sanford Heisler Kimpel’s Employment Discrimination Practice. She has managed all aspects of litigation, including pre-suit settlement, discovery, summary judgment, and trial in a variety of discrimination and wage and hour matters. Ms. Marcuse is currently Lead Counsel in Barrett et al. v. Forest Laboratories et al. (SDNY) and Smith et al. v. Merck & Co, Inc. (DNJ), two gender discrimination class actions filed on behalf of thousands of female pharmaceutical sales representatives nationwide. In 2014, courts rejected defendants’ attempts to dismiss both cases. Ms. Marcuse has negotiated and secured significant monetary awards for clients with discrimination, harassment, and retaliation claims in the legal, pharmaceutical, financial, manufacturing and commercial real estate sectors, including corporate executives.
Ms. Marcuse recently co-authored Supreme Court amicus briefs on behalf of women’s rights organizations and individuals in Mach Mining v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and on behalf of LGBT student organizations at undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools in Obergefell v. Hodges.
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Before joining Sanford Heisler Kimpel in 2009, Ms. Marcuse worked to establish the City of New Haven’s Prison Reentry Initiative as a 2008-2009 Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow. As the Initiative’s founding Coordinator, Ms. Marcuse helped to pass a municipal ordinance banning unfair discrimination against job applicants with conviction histories by the City of New Haven and the vendors with which it contracts.
During her time at Yale, Ms. Marcuse served as the Student Director for a clinic representing individuals incarcerated in state and federal prisons in civil rights and post-conviction actions. Ms. Marcuse was also a member of the clinic team that represented more than thirty individuals detained in federal immigration raids on the community of Fair Haven in 2007, arguing that the raids were illegally carried out as retaliation against the city of New Haven for its creation of an innovative program offering municipal identification to all residents regardless of their citizenship status. Upon graduating from law school, Ms. Marcuse was awarded the Frances Wayland Prize for the student showing greatest proficiency in preparing and presenting a case in negotiation, arbitration and litigation.
Before becoming a lawyer, Ms. Marcuse studied the intersection of religion and moral regulation at Duke University, where she received her Ph.D. in Religion in 2005.
