Deborah K. Marcuse

Eighty-Five Percent

Michael Rumsey filed a timely charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after IBM included him in a group layoff in 2016.

The agency consolidated similar complaints and investigated the layoffs for more than four years. In September 2020, it found reasonable cause to believe age discrimination had occurred, and concluded that workers over forty had comprised more than eighty-five percent of the group from which the challenged layoffs were selected.

Rumsey then demanded arbitration within ninety days of receiving the agency's right-to-sue notice — the filing period Congress provides after that notice.

IBM argued that the demand was untimely, because his arbitration agreement contained a 300-day provision that had already run.

Two Deadlines, Not One

Marcuse and a team of employee-side and public-interest lawyers brought a federal action in Massachusetts addressing whether an agreement could shorten the limitations period Congress built into the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

The argument turned on separating two clocks that the contract had collapsed into one.

The ADEA requires a worker to file an agency charge within the applicable administrative deadline. An individual may bring suit once sixty days have passed from filing that charge, without waiting for a right-to-sue notice. If the EEOC dismisses the charge or ends its proceedings, receipt of the agency's notice starts a separate ninety-day filing period.

The four-year investigation made the consequence concrete. On IBM's reading, its contractual clock would have expired while the agency still held Rumsey's charge, cutting off arbitration before the statutory filing period following the notice had run. He would have lost the right to arbitrate by waiting for the government to finish its investigation.

In October 2025, Judge Angel Kelley held that the ADEA's limitations structure was a substantive statutory protection under controlling First Circuit law, and could not be shortened by the arbitration agreement. A final declaratory judgment entered on May 19, 2026 prevented IBM from enforcing the 300-day provision against Rumsey.

The judgment preserved Rumsey's ability to pursue his age-discrimination claim in arbitration after the four-year agency investigation and rejected IBM's attempt to cut that statutory filing period down to 300 days from the layoff.

Workweeks

Marcuse represented Kelli Smith in litigation challenging pay and advancement practices affecting women in Merck sales positions. In April 2016, U.S. District Judge Michael A. Shipp conditionally certified a nationwide Equal Pay Act collective.

Smith's own experience supplied the individual event. What made it a collective action was whether the same pattern extended across a sales force she could not see from her own territory — so Marcuse's team tested her account against compensation files, rankings, job grades, reporting lines, and records from distant territories.

The case resolved through a $6.2 million non-reversionary settlement covering women in specified sales grades. Administrators sent 2,919 notices. Eighteen women sought exclusion. No one objected.

Individual allocations were based principally on the number of workweeks each woman spent in a covered position. Because the formula used employer-documented time in the job, claimants did not have to prove individualized treatment to calculate their shares. The same employer records used in the classwide proof supplied the allocation data.

Because the fund was non-reversionary, unclaimed amounts did not return to Merck. The employer therefore received no benefit from class members who did not submit claims.

The Ride-Along

In 2014, the federal court allowed substantial portions of a case against Forest Laboratories to proceed, including pattern-or-practice and disparate-impact theories concerning pay, promotion, pregnancy, and job-sharing policies.

In 2015, the court conditionally certified an Equal Pay Act collective after the plaintiffs presented expert analysis identifying statistically significant compensation differences between male and female sales representatives.

The evidentiary hinge was a document called a Field Trip Evaluation — the assessment a manager wrote after riding along with a representative for a day.

Those evaluations fed annual reviews, which fed bonus compensation, stock options, and promotion eligibility. A single subjective judgment, recorded in the field, propagated through every downstream decision about a career.

The ride-along evaluations connected individual manager judgments to a uniform companywide process that could be analyzed across the sales force. Each report contained a specific manager's assessment of a specific woman, while the repeated format and downstream use made the records comparable at scale.

After six years of litigation, Forest agreed to a $4 million common fund covering approximately 3,200 women who had worked in specified legacy-Forest sales and training positions between February 2010 and April 2017. Final approval came in June 2018, and company records were used to identify class members and calculate shares.

Who Controls a Career

Marcuse served as lead class counsel for women who studied or worked in Dartmouth College's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

The case required establishing the extent of a graduate student's dependence on a single faculty member.

Professors controlled laboratory access, research funding, authorship, conference opportunities, recommendations, and early-career placement. Each of those is a gate, and one person held all of them. A student who objected risked not a bad review but the end of a scientific career she had spent years preparing for — with no lateral market to move into, because the recommendation she would need came from the person she was objecting to.

Marcuse's team mapped those professional dependencies and then converted them into settlement terms addressing both completed claims and how Dartmouth would operate going forward.

The $14 million settlement used a non-reversionary fund. Ninety-two notices were sent; four women sought exclusion; no class member objected. The final class contained seventy-six women.

Twenty-nine class members submitted supplemental claims for independent evaluation. After applicable deductions, their anticipated awards averaged nearly $280,000. Judge Landya McCafferty granted final approval on July 10, 2020.

Dartmouth's Continuing-Role Provision

The agreement committed at least $1.5 million to additional measures.

Dartmouth increased support for the Provost's diversity-recruitment fund and the Women in Science Project, and created an external advisory group whose members the plaintiffs helped select. The women who brought the case also received a continuing role in discussions concerning the department's culture and accountability.

If the harm arose from a structure in which the affected people had no standing to raise concerns, then a remedy that pays them and removes them reproduces the original defect. Giving the plaintiffs a continuing voice — and letting them help choose the outside reviewers — changes who is in the room the next time something goes wrong. After final approval and distribution of the monetary relief, the plaintiffs remained participants in discussions about department culture and in the external advisory structure they had helped shape.

The Profession's Own Workplaces

Marcuse has also brought pay-equity and advancement litigation to the workplaces lawyers know best: national law firms.

She served as a lead attorney in gender-discrimination cases on behalf of women lawyers at two national firms, Jones Day and Morrison & Foerster. The Jones Day litigation concerned a compensation system in which each associate's pay was set individually and confidentially, so that no lawyer could compare her salary to a colleague's — a structure in which a disparity can persist precisely because no one can see it. The Morrison & Foerster matter concerned the treatment of lawyers who became pregnant or took parental leave, and what happened to their assignments and advancement when they returned.

The law-firm matters used compensation data, advancement records, and documents reflecting subjective judgments to test whether individual experiences reflected broader patterns within the firms.

Clear and Convincing

In Miranda v. Barr, Marcuse was among counsel for three detained men challenging Maryland immigration bond procedures that placed the burden on the noncitizen to prove that he was neither dangerous nor likely to flee.

In May 2020, the District of Maryland granted a preliminary injunction. The order required the government to establish danger or flight risk by clear and convincing evidence, and required immigration judges to consider financial resources and alternatives to detention.

Shifting the burden required the government to justify detention rather than assume it. Requiring consideration of financial resources prevented an unaffordable bond from functioning as a detention order without a finding of necessity.

Marcuse and the civil-rights team connected continued detention to the government's burden of proof, each man's financial resources, and the available alternatives. The injunction converted those record categories into hearing rules.

Friend of the Court

Marcuse has also co-authored amicus briefs in two United States Supreme Court cases.

In Mach Mining v. EEOC, she co-authored a brief on behalf of women's rights organizations in a case about the agency's pre-suit conciliation duties — the machinery that runs between a worker's charge and a courtroom, the very interval on which the IBM case would later turn. In Obergefell v. Hodges, she co-authored a brief on behalf of LGBT student organizations at undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools across the country.

The briefs brought the perspectives of women’s rights and LGBT student organizations into the Court’s consideration of the two cases.

Moving the Question Later

Marcuse earned a B.A. in History from Yale College, a doctorate in Religion from Duke University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2008.

She then worked in the New Haven Mayor's Office as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow and founding coordinator of the city's reentry initiative, working with city officials, organizers, and residents on a fair-chance ordinance enacted in February 2009.

The ordinance removed the criminal-history question from city employment applications until after a provisional offer, and required contractors and vendors doing business with New Haven to use consistent hiring practices.

The ordinance permitted a lawful background inquiry after provisional selection, allowing an applicant to establish qualifications before conviction history entered the decision. At that point the employer had a specific candidate in view rather than only a checkbox on a form. Extending the rule to contractors carried the same sequence beyond the city payroll to jobs funded by the city but filled by vendors.

The New Haven ordinance changed when conviction history entered the hiring process. Rumsey later presented another sequencing question: whether IBM could make an arbitration deadline expire before the EEOC process ended.

Practice

Marcuse joined Sanford Heisler in 2009, co-chaired its employment discrimination practice, managed its New York and Baltimore offices, and became firmwide managing partner of a national plaintiffs' employment and civil-rights practice. She left that role in 2024 and now leads Marcuse Law LLC in Baltimore and New York, while serving as of counsel to Lumen Law Center. She is admitted to practice in New York, the District of Columbia, and Maryland.

She has held leadership and teaching roles with the National Employment Lawyers Association, including its class-and-collective-actions practice group and its Trial Boot Camp.

In March 2026, she taught employment lawyers about understanding an employer's technology when preserving and obtaining evidence — payroll platforms, customer-relationship systems, performance dashboards, human-resources databases, messaging tools, and document-retention systems.

Forest and Merck depended on employer-controlled evaluation, compensation, and promotion data. Her 2026 training focused on identifying, preserving, and obtaining that kind of evidence within employer-controlled systems and retention schedules.