Deepak Gupta

Vincent and Liza Concepcion were charged $30.22 in sales tax for phones advertised as free. Their contract with AT&T allowed individual arbitration but prohibited class proceedings. Deepak Gupta argued for them in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion at the Supreme Court on November 9, 2010, seeking to preserve California's rule against class waivers that effectively insulated a company from responsibility for small, widespread injuries.

Gupta, then at Public Citizen Litigation Group, began with the Federal Arbitration Act's preservation of ordinary contract defenses. His argument distinguished choosing arbitration as a forum from using a contract to avoid legal responsibility. The Court ruled five to four in 2011 that federal law displaced California's rule. Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent emphasized the difficulty of finding a lawyer to pursue a claim arising from a $30.22 charge, even with the incentives AT&T offered individual claimants.

Building a Plaintiffs' Appellate Practice

Gupta studied philosophy at Fordham University and Sanskrit at Oxford before earning his law degree at Georgetown and clerking for Judge Lawrence K. Karlton in the Eastern District of California. His early work included voting-rights cases in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, prisoners' rights litigation at the ACLU's National Prison Project, and religious-liberty cases at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

During seven years at Public Citizen Litigation Group, he founded the Consumer Justice Project and served as the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Assistance Project Fellow. Elizabeth Warren later hired him as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's first appellate litigator. As senior counsel, he launched the agency's program for filing friend-of-the-court briefs. In 2012, he founded the firm that became Gupta Wessler, representing consumers, workers and injured people in appeals involving arbitration, preemption, personal jurisdiction, class certification and standing.

In a 2016 article about developing a plaintiffs' appellate bar, Gupta described how the firm assembled lawyers with experience in public-interest organizations, private firms and government. Existing professional networks and referrals connected that small team with trial lawyers across the country, from solo practitioners to national class-action firms. He wanted plaintiffs to have access to the specialist appellate representation already available to corporate defendants.

Choosing the Question for Review

In Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, Gupta prevailed in a First Amendment challenge to restrictions on how merchants communicated credit-card prices. In Smith v. Berryhill, the Supreme Court appointed him to brief and argue an otherwise undefended position concerning judicial review of Social Security determinations. He was the first Asian American lawyer the Court appointed to argue a case.

His argument in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court helped secure a unanimous ruling allowing residents injured in Montana and Minnesota to sue Ford in their home states. The company had extensively marketed and serviced the vehicle models there. The Court rejected Ford's attempt to confine jurisdiction to places where the particular vehicles had been designed, manufactured or originally sold. In Cantero v. Bank of America, Gupta obtained a unanimous 2024 decision requiring a practical assessment of whether a state consumer-protection law prevented or significantly interfered with a national bank's powers before treating the state law as preempted.

During the 2024–2025 term, Gupta argued that the Labcorp and Nvidia cases were unsuitable vehicles for the questions presented to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed both after argument as improvidently granted. Those orders left the lower-court rulings in place without announcing new nationwide rules on the patients' and investors' claims.

Preserving the Judgment

Gupta's appellate work also begins after a plaintiff has proved a case at trial. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the approximately $200 million insurance bad-faith verdict his team defended against Sierra Health and Life. In October 2025, the Washington Supreme Court reinstated a $185 million verdict arising from three teachers' exposure to PCB contamination at a school. Gupta and his colleagues defended the application of Missouri law to particular issues and the admissibility of expert testimony reconstructing historic exposure. The ruling affected more than a billion dollars in related school-contamination claims involving teachers and students.

The firm's verdict-defense work also encompasses survivors of sexual abuse, victims of elder neglect and policyholders whose insurers denied coverage. As lead counsel in the PACER litigation, Gupta secured a $125 million settlement over unlawful federal court-records fees.

He has continued to defend the CFPB through scholarship, litigation for its employees and allies, and public advocacy. In March 2025, he welcomed a preliminary injunction blocking the administration's plan to dismantle the agency, describing it as a protection of the separation of powers and the Bureau's work.

Specialists Working with Trial Lawyers

Gupta teaches the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Harvard Law School and has taught seminars on forced arbitration and the civil justice system. In "Arbitration as Wealth Transfer," coauthored with Lina Khan and published in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 2017, he examined the economic consequences of preventing consumers and workers from combining their claims. The authors argued that procedural restrictions could transfer wealth by suppressing claims that otherwise would have been brought.

Congress addressed one part of the arbitration problem in 2022. For covered disputes arising on or after enactment, people alleging sexual assault or sexual harassment could elect court proceedings despite a predispute arbitration agreement or joint-action waiver. The change preserved a choice of forum for those disputes without eliminating the broader questions Gupta had litigated and studied.

In his 2016 article, Gupta urged appellate specialists to build lasting relationships with trial lawyers and coordinate their work on recurring questions such as arbitration, preemption and class-action rules. Appeals, he argued, were a setting in which a small, experienced team could counter a much larger firm. His proposal was to make that expertise available through the relationships among lawyers already representing plaintiffs.