Deepak Gupta

Deepak Gupta is the founding principal of Gupta Wessler LLP, a firm that focuses on Supreme Court, appellate, and complex litigation on behalf of plaintiffs and other public-interest clients. 

At Harvard, Deepak co-teaches the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic and has taught an annual seminar on forced arbitration and the American civil justice system and a reading group on entrepreneurship in public interest law. He was a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard in 2018-19 and previously taught courses on appellate advocacy and public interest law at Georgetown and American universities.

Much of Deepak’s two-decade legal career has focused on securing access to justice for consumers, workers, and communities injured by corporate or governmental wrongdoing. He has handled a wide range of cutting-edge cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, all thirteen federal circuits, many state supreme courts, and trial courts nationwide, and has testified before the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. 

Deepak is a veteran advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court, where he has filed more than one hundred briefs. Highlights include:

• In the 2024-25 term, Deepak’s firm has four merits cases in the Court, of which he is personally arguing three: Labcorp. v. Davis, on class actions and standing; Stanley v. City of Sanford, on retirees’ right to sue for disability discrimination (January 2025); and Nvidia v. Ohman, on pleading standards in securities cases (November 2024).
• In the 2023-24 term, Deepak’s firm had three merits arguments before the Court. Among other things, he and his colleagues unanimously defeated sweeping federal preemption of state consumer law in Cantero v. Bank of America.
• In 2021, Deepak argued and prevailed in Ford v. Montana Eighth Judicial District, in which the Court ruled that people injured by mass-market products can sue out-of-state corporations where their injury occurred, bucking a trend of jurisdiction-limiting decisions stretching back four decades.
• In 2019, Deepak argued at the Justices’ invitation in support of a judgment left undefended by the Solicitor General; he is the first Asian-American to be appointed by the Supreme Court to argue a case.
• In 2017, Deepak represented parties in three argued merits cases; he was lead counsel in two, prevailing in both. In Hernández v. Mesa, he represented the family of a Mexican teenager killed in a cross-border shooting by a border patrol agent, obtaining reversal of a ruling that the officer was entitled to qualified immunity. And in Expressions v. Schneiderman, he successfully argued a First Amendment challenge to a law designed to keep consumers in the dark about the cost of credit cards.
• In 2010, Deepak argued AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, a watershed case on corporations’ use of forced arbitration to prevent consumers and workers from banding together to seek justice. 

Among other honors, Deepak is the recipient of the 2022 Appellate Advocacy Award from the National Civil Justice Institute, which “recognizes excellence in appellate advocacy in America,” the Steven Sharpe Award for Public Service from the American Association for Justice, and the President’s Award from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges.

As an appellate advocate, Deepak is frequently sought out by plaintiffs’ trial lawyers to defend their most consequential victories or resurrect worthy claims on appeal—often after years of hard-fought litigation. He is currently defending several nine-figure and eight-figure jury verdicts on appeal. He also prosecutes class actions and other legal challenges from the ground up: 

• In National Veterans Legal Services v. United States, Deepak is lead counsel in a nationwide class action in which he persuaded the Federal Circuit that the federal judiciary has been charging people millions of dollars in unlawful fees for online access to court records. The case recently culminated in a $125 million settlement that reimburses the majority of PACER users by 100 cents on the dollar.
• In another one-of-a-kind class action, Deepak represented all of the nation’s bankruptcy judges, recovering $56 million in back pay for Congress’s violation of the Judicial Compensation Clause. The American Lawyer observed: “it’s hard to imagine a higher compliment than being hired to represent federal judges.” 

Deepak also frequently leads high-stakes administrative and constitutional cases involving the federal government. Among other things, he: 

• is representing Gwynne Wilcox, challenging the unprecedented attempt to remove her from the National Labor Relations Board
• is representing the plaintiffs in a suit to prevent the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• persuaded the D.C. Circuit to issue a rare injunction on appeal halting the attempted government takeover of the Open Technology Fund, internet-freedom nonprofit
• represented environmental groups in a successful challenge to a midnight rule that would have crippled the EPA’s ability to rely on science in setting public-health standards
• obtained a ruling striking down an IRS decision to stop collecting donor information from campaign-finance groups
• established that the Acting Director of the Bureau of Land Management was serving unlawfully for 424 days.
• represented the Association of Administrative Law Judges in a challenge to the constitutionality of the Federal Service Impasses Panel.

Before founding his law firm in 2012, Deepak was Senior Counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the first appellate litigator hired under Elizabeth Warren’s leadership, he launched the new agency’s amicus program, defended its regulations, and worked with the Solicitor General’s office on Supreme Court cases. For seven years previously, he was an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, where he founded and directed the Consumer Justice Project and was the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Assistance Project Fellow.

Deepak is a member of the American Law Institute and the Administrative Conference of the United States and sits on the boards or advisory boards of the National Consumer Law Center; the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights; the Open Markets Institute; the Alliance for Justice; the People’s Parity Project; the National Plaintiffs’ Law Association; and the Civil Justice Research Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley.