Matthew W.H. Wessler

Christopher Sulyma, a former Intel engineer, alleged that his retirement plans had put too much money into hedge funds and private equity. Intel's plan administrators had made disclosures available online and sent emails directing participants to them. Sulyma had visited the benefits website, but testified that he did not remember reading the disclosures and had been unaware of those investments. When Matthew W.H. Wessler represented him at the Supreme Court, the question was whether access to the information alone gave Sulyma "actual knowledge" of it.

For fiduciary-breach claims, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as ERISA, ordinarily allows six years. Its three-year period applies after the participant gains "actual knowledge," which Wessler's brief distinguished from mere access to a disclosure. Emails and website records could be evidence of knowledge; making information available did not establish, as a matter of law, that the recipient knew its contents. The brief argued that "actual" meant real awareness, not information a participant should have learned.

Wessler argued the case on December 4, 2019. In February 2020, the Court unanimously held in Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee v. Sulyma that disclosure alone did not start the three-year clock. Defendants could still prove awareness through testimony or circumstantial evidence; the ruling did not make a participant's denial conclusive. It preserved the distinction Congress had drawn between the ordinary period and the shorter one in a statute protecting the retirement savings of tens of millions of participants.

Building a Plaintiffs' Appellate Practice

Wessler graduated from Williams College and Cornell Law School, clerked for Judge Richard L. Nygaard of the Third Circuit and Judge William E. Smith of the District of Rhode Island, and practiced at Williams & Connolly in Washington. He also served on the Obama campaign's sensitive-litigation team. During six years at Public Justice, he led its Supreme Court practice and represented workers and consumers in cases concerning retirement benefits, arbitration and access to the courts.

When he joined Deepak Gupta's appellate firm, it became Gupta Wessler. He is a principal working across its Washington and Boston offices, with a practice encompassing ERISA, payday lending, arbitration, antitrust, preemption and civil procedure. He works with trial lawyers on appeals concerning retirement losses, unlawful debts, competition and the ability to pursue claims in court.

The Rights Available in Arbitration

In Williams v. Medley Opportunity Fund II, Wessler argued for Christina Williams and Michael Stermel, whose three online loans carried annual interest rates ranging from about 497 to 715 percent. Their agreements with AWL, a tribally owned lender, required disputes to be decided under tribal law, excluding the federal and state protections the borrowers sought to invoke. They sued the lender's holding company and several directors, alleging violations of Pennsylvania law and the federal racketeering statute.

The defendants invoked a delegation clause assigning questions about the arbitration agreement's enforceability to the arbitrator. Wessler and co-counsel Michael Quirk challenged that clause as well as the rest of the agreement: an arbitrator restricted to tribal law could not apply the federal protections needed to assess the waiver. In July 2020, the Third Circuit held that the prospective waiver made the agreement, including its delegation clause, unenforceable. The borrowers could continue their claims.

That month, Wessler and his colleagues also prevailed in the Fourth Circuit in Gibbs v. Haynes Investments and Gibbs v. Sequoia Capital Operations. Those cases concerned Virginia borrowers charged triple-digit interest and investors alleged to have financed or supported tribal lending operations. The lenders asserted sovereign immunity; the appeals addressed the investors' attempts to enforce arbitration. The court rejected provisions that prevented borrowers from pursuing federal statutory remedies. The decisions opened a route for thousands of borrowers to challenge their debts without treating a choice of arbitration as consent to surrender the underlying rights.

Competition and Uncertified Claims

In In re Lantus Direct Purchaser Antitrust Litigation, Wessler helped challenge Sanofi's use of a patent listing to delay competing insulin products. Listing a patent in the FDA's Orange Book could enable the manufacturer to trigger a thirty-month pause in approval of a rival product. The challenged patent covered a drive mechanism used inside an injection pen, not the drug for which the listing had been submitted. The purchasers' claimed antitrust injury was paying inflated prices because competition had been delayed. In February 2020, the First Circuit revived that claim without deciding the damages ultimately due.

In Molock v. Whole Foods Market, he argued for employees alleging that the company had manipulated a bonus program and deprived them of wages. Whole Foods sought dismissal of proposed class members outside the District of Columbia for lack of personal jurisdiction. The D.C. Circuit held in March 2020 that the request was premature: before certification, the unnamed members were not parties to the action. The ruling preserved the workers' ability to seek a nationwide class without deciding every jurisdictional question that might arise after certification.

Advocacy Beyond the Named Client

The Pound Civil Justice Institute gave Wessler its Appellate Advocacy Award in 2020 for his work on behalf of plaintiffs. He serves as outside appellate counsel to the American Association for Justice, represents national labor unions including the SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers, and teaches practitioners through professional programs. He also comments publicly on civil-justice questions. His Supreme Court briefing has supported injured people in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht and Hardeman v. Monsanto, and addressed arbitration in Henry Schein v. Archer & White Sales.

In April 2026, he was counsel of record for the American Association for Justice and Public Justice in their amicus filing in Monsanto v. Durnell. Wessler publicly connected the pesticide manufacturer's courtroom position to efforts in state legislatures and Congress to obtain immunity from failure-to-warn liability. The organizations argued that Missouri's warning obligation was consistent with the manufacturer's federal duties, and asked the Court to preserve the injured person's right to pursue a state-law remedy.

A Second Intel Question

Wessler is counsel of record for Intel retirement-plan participants in Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee, another ERISA dispute involving the company's use of hedge funds and private equity. The participants allege that the plan fiduciaries invested imprudently. After the Ninth Circuit required them to identify a meaningful benchmark to support an inference of imprudence, Wessler's petition asked the Supreme Court to decide whether ERISA imposes that pleading requirement on underperformance-based duty-of-prudence claims.

The Court granted review on January 16, 2026. Wessler filed the petitioners' merits brief on April 23 and their reply on August 3. The case is set for argument on October 6, 2026. Unlike Sulyma, which asked when a participant actually knows enough to trigger ERISA's shorter limitations period, Anderson concerns what a participant must plead at the outset to state a prudence claim.