Deborah K. Marcuse

IBM’s Arbitration Deadline

Michael Rumsey was fifty-two when IBM included him in a group layoff in 2016. The separation package offered one month of salary and three months of continued health and life-insurance benefits. To receive them, he signed an agreement that released most claims and required any federal age-discrimination claim to proceed alone in private arbitration.

IBM also read the agreement to require workers to demand arbitration within the same 180- or 300-day period used to file an agency charge. That deadline would begin while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission process was still underway, even though federal law ordinarily permits suit within ninety days after the agency finishes and issues a right-to-sue notice.

Rumsey filed a timely EEOC charge. The agency consolidated similar complaints and spent more than four years investigating IBM’s layoffs. In September 2020, it found reasonable cause to believe age discrimination had occurred. The agency found top-down pressure to reduce the number of older employees and concluded that workers over forty comprised more than eighty-five percent of the group from which the challenged layoffs were selected.

Rumsey demanded arbitration within ninety days after receiving the agency’s notice. IBM argued that the demand was years too late under the separation agreement. Represented by Deborah K. Marcuse and a team of employee-side and public-interest lawyers, Rumsey brought a federal action in Massachusetts to determine whether a private contract could eliminate the limitations period Congress attached to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

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 was entered on May 19, 2026, preventing IBM from enforcing the 300-day provision against Rumsey. His age-discrimination allegations remained for the arbitral forum. The federal judgment preserved his ability to reach that forum after he waited for the agency investigation required by the statute.

Pregnancy and Advancement at Merck

Kelli Smith had worked for Merck for five years and had received recognition for her sales performance when she became pregnant. Smith alleged that managerial support disappeared during her pregnancy, that she returned from maternity leave to the same rank held by entry-level representatives, and that supervisors connected the demotion and the denial of a company award to the timing of her baby and leave. She also alleged lower pay than similarly situated men, stalled advancement, adverse evaluations, and discipline after she complained internally.

Smith’s experience became the first account in a proposed nationwide case. Additional women alleged that managers responded to strong performance with hostility, reassignment, reduced compensation, or diminished advancement during pregnancy or after maternity leave. Smith and the putative class also challenged compensation structures that penalized managers when employees took protected leave. Merck denied the allegations and maintained that its employment practices were lawful.

In April 2016, U.S. District Judge Michael A. Shipp conditionally certified a nationwide Equal Pay Act collective. That procedural ruling allowed notice to reach female sales representatives across the country and permitted eligible women to decide whether to join. Public announcements initially associated $250 million in claimed damages with the litigation. The eventual resolution was a $6.2 million non-reversionary settlement covering women in specified sales grades.

Administrators sent 2,919 notices. Eighteen women sought exclusion, and no one objected. Class counsel estimated approximately $21.9 million in economic back pay; the fund equaled roughly twenty-eight percent of that estimate. Individual allocations rested principally on the number of workweeks each woman spent in a covered position. Merck admitted no liability.

Marcuse’s work in Smith v. Merck connected one employee’s experience to nationwide payroll and promotion data. Smith’s return from leave supplied the event. Compensation files, rankings, job grades, reporting lines, and the experiences of women in distant territories determined whether the event repeated across the sales force.

The Field Trip Evaluation

At Forest Laboratories, a manager’s ride-along assessment could affect annual reviews, bonus compensation, stock options, and eligibility for promotion. The company called those reports Field Trip Evaluations. Megan Barrett alleged that she had earned strong sales results before maternity leave and that her manager sharply reduced her evaluation scores after she returned. Barrett alleged that the lower scores cut her bonus compensation, blocked promotional opportunities, and preceded her termination in April 2011.

Lindsey Houser alleged that Forest withheld bonuses she had earned before leave because the payments were distributed while she was away. When she interviewed for a promotion at eight months pregnant, the questions allegedly concentrated on the pregnancy. She further alleged that a manager lowered her evaluation scores after her return, made sexual comments, and said he would stop hiring women because they became pregnant and took maternity leave.

Forest disputed the claims. In 2014, the federal court examined the women’s allegations one by one and allowed substantial portions of the case to proceed, including pattern-or-practice and disparate-impact theories concerning pay, promotion, pregnancy, and job-sharing policies. The court allowed the company-wide pay, promotion, pregnancy, and job-sharing theories to proceed and identified the evidence needed in the next phase.

The next phase tested the aggregate proof. In 2015, the court conditionally certified an Equal Pay Act collective after the plaintiffs presented expert analysis identifying statistically significant differences between the compensation of male and female sales representatives. The statistical disparity exceeded the conventional threshold used to distinguish a pattern from random variation.

After six years of litigation, Forest agreed to a $4 million common fund. The settlement covered 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 the approved process used company records to identify class members and calculate their shares.

Dartmouth Laboratory Claims

For a graduate scientist, a professor can control laboratory access, research funding, authorship, conference opportunities, recommendations, and the path to a first academic appointment. Nine women who studied or worked in Dartmouth College’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences alleged that three tenured professors used that concentrated authority inside a sexually hostile environment and that the institution failed to protect students dependent on them.

The nine women alleged groping, sexualized comments, unwanted advances, assaults, drinking-centered laboratory events, late-night gatherings at professors’ homes, and retaliation or professional harm when women resisted. They also alleged that faculty members selected assistants for their appearance and blurred the boundary between scientific training and private social access. Dartmouth stated that it had been unaware of the alleged conduct until students brought it forward and later thanked the plaintiffs for exposing the environment created by the former professors.

Marcuse served as lead class counsel. The $14 million settlement used a non-reversionary fund and a confidential supplemental-claims process to account for different levels of injury. Ninety-two notices were sent. Four women sought exclusion, no class member objected, and the final class contained seventy-six women. Twenty-nine submitted supplemental claims for independent evaluation; after deductions, their anticipated awards averaged nearly $280,000.

The agreement also committed at least $1.5 million to changes beyond the payments. Dartmouth added funding to the Provost’s diversity-recruitment fund, increased support for the Women in Science Project, and created an external advisory group whose members the plaintiffs helped select. The women who brought the case also gained a continuing role in discussions about the department’s culture and accountability.

Judge Landya McCafferty granted final approval on July 10, 2020. The payments addressed injuries already suffered. The remaining terms changed how future students would seek laboratory positions, advisers, publications, and recommendations.

Immigration Bond Procedures

Marcuse’s civil-rights work also entered the immigration detention system in Maryland. In Miranda v. Barr, three detained men challenged bond procedures that placed the burden on the noncitizen to prove he was neither dangerous nor likely to flee. Ajibade Thompson Adegoke received a $15,000 bond he could not afford. Jose de la Cruz Espinoza received a $20,000 bond after a brief hearing conducted while he struggled with a language barrier. The plaintiffs argued that detention continued because the process did not require the government to justify confinement or the immigration judge to consider ability to pay and less restrictive conditions.

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. The court reasoned that detention must remain connected to its asserted purposes rather than become the automatic consequence of poverty.

The government appealed. In May 2022, the Fourth Circuit vacated the injunction. It held that federal immigration law deprived the district court of authority to impose class-wide injunctive relief and concluded that the existing bond procedures supplied constitutionally sufficient process. The Fourth Circuit’s opinion preserved both parts of the procedural history: the district court’s reasoning and the appellate holding that statutory limits barred class-wide relief.

For a period, the district-court order changed the terms on which detention could continue. The appellate decision removed that relief and fixed the governing limits on class-wide injunctions and due process in the Fourth Circuit. The full procedural history now contains both the district court’s effort to connect detention to necessity and the appellate court’s rejection of that constitutional rule.

The Box on the Application

Marcuse entered law after an academic path. She 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. Her first year after law school was spent in the New Haven Mayor’s Office as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow and founding coordinator of the city’s initiative for residents returning from incarceration.

Employment was one of the immediate barriers. A criminal-history question at the top of an application allowed a conviction to decide the process before an employer considered qualifications. Marcuse worked with city officials, organizers, and residents on a fair-chance ordinance enacted in February 2009. The measure removed the conviction-history question from city applications until after a provisional offer and required contractors and vendors doing business with New Haven to use consistent hiring practices.

The ordinance did not prevent a lawful background inquiry. It changed its position in the sequence. An applicant first had an opportunity to establish experience and qualifications; conviction history entered after the employer had identified the person as otherwise fit for the work. Extending the rule to vendors widened its reach beyond city payrolls.

That early work placed a familiar employment-law problem in municipal form. A single box could screen out an applicant before any formal rejection was recorded. Changing the form changed when a decision maker received the information and what the employer had to know before using it.

Company-Wide Employment Evidence

Marcuse joined Sanford Heisler in 2009, later 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 has secured more than $50 million in recoveries, along with changes to workplace policies and programs for individual clients and classes.

Marcuse is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and has served in leadership and teaching roles for the National Employment Lawyers Association, including its class-and-collective-actions practice group and Trial Boot Camp.

In March 2026, Marcuse taught employment lawyers about understanding an employer’s technology when preserving and obtaining evidence. The subject reaches the core of class litigation. Payroll platforms, customer-relationship systems, performance dashboards, human-resources databases, messaging tools, and document-retention rules determine what can be compared and what may disappear before discovery begins.

Marcuse’s class cases depend on both individual testimony and company-wide data. Kelli Smith’s demotion supplies a concrete event; compensation records, evaluations, and promotion data show whether similar decisions affected thousands of other women.

Individual Testimony and Class Proof

At Merck, 2,919 notices were tied to women alleging that pregnancy leave affected rank and opportunity. At Forest, evaluations, bonuses, promotion interviews, and pay records supported statistical analysis. At Dartmouth, a $14 million settlement fund addressed claims involving laboratories, advisers, and scientific careers.

Rumsey’s case presented the same problem through time rather than headcount. The EEOC process developed evidence over four years. IBM’s reading of the contract would have required the arbitration demand before that evidence existed. The federal judgment kept the statutory sequence intact.