Deborah K. Marcuse is the owner and principal attorney at Marcuse Law LLC, with offices in Baltimore, MD and New York, NY, and Of Counsel at Lumen Law Center, where she is delighted to work alongside her bold, courageous, and empathetic one-time client Andrea “Andi” Mazingo.

For the last seventeen years Deborah has litigated and resolved high-profile, high-stakes individual and class civil rights and employment cases, obtaining over $50 million and meaningful programmatic relief for clients and class members.

Until 2024 Deborah was Managing Partner of a nationally known plaintiff-side employment and civil rights firm with more than 50 lawyers and staff at seven offices nationwide. As a manager and mentor of humans in a profession not always hospitable to our flourishing, Deborah strives to exemplify and model a form of zealous advocacy that is vigorous, thoughtful, and humane, and a vision of lawyering that is client-centered, oriented toward social and economic justice, and accommodating of the lives of working people.   

A Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Deborah has been recognized by the Maryland Daily Record among its Leaders in Law, by Benchmark Litigation on its Inaugural Top 20 Labor and Employment Litigators List and as a Litigation Star since 2018, by the National Law Journal as one of the Elite Women of the Plaintiff’s Bar and a Plaintiffs’ Lawyer Trailblazer, and by Law360 as an Employment MVP. She is an active member of the National Employment Lawyers’ Association where she was until recently Co-Chair of the Class and Collective Actions Practice Group and has served as Trial Boot Camp faculty.

Deborah received her law degree from Yale Law School, her doctorate in Religion from Duke University, and her Bachelor of Arts cum laude with Distinction in History from Yale College. As an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow from 2008 - 2009, Deborah served as the Founding Coordinator of the City of New Haven’s Initiative to support residents returning home from incarceration.

Deborah has lived since 2018 in her beloved adopted city of Baltimore, where she attempts annually to grow vegetables alongside her schoolteacher spouse, two revolutionary children, an oddly glamorous blue-tongued skink, and her somnolent miniature schnauzer coworker Frank.