Deepak Gupta

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

At Harvard, Deepak co-teaches the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, which gives law students exposure to practice before the nation’s highest court through work in small, closely supervised teams. He has also taught a recurring 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.

The National Law Journal recently described Deepak as “a mainstay of the Supreme Court lectern and the go-to advocate for consumers and other plaintiffs with cases before the justices.” Much of his 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 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. 

Highlights of Deepak’s Supreme Court advocacy include: 

• In the 2024-25 term, Deepak’s firm had four merits cases before the Court, winning three. Deepak achieved the rare feat of securing two post-argument dismissals-in Labcorp. v. Davis, on class actions and standing, and Nvidia v. Ohman, on pleading standards for securities fraud.
• In the 2023-24 term, Deepak’s firm had three merits arguments before the Court, winning two-including unanimously defeating 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 where their injury occurred, bucking a decades-long trend of jurisdiction-limiting jurisprudence.
• 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 has received the 2025 Consumer Advocate of the Year Award from the Nevada Justice Association; the 2022 Appellate Advocacy Award from the National Civil Justice Institute (recognizing “excellence in appellate advocacy in America”); the Steven Sharpe Public Service Award from the American Association for Justice; and the President’s Award from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges.

Deepak is frequently sought out by plaintiffs’ trial lawyers to defend their biggest victories—including some of the nation’s largest verdicts. He is currently defending several nine-figure and eight-figure jury verdicts on appeal. He also serves as outside counsel for the American Association of Justice. 

Deepak also prosecutes class actions and other legal challenges from the ground up: 

• Deepak 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 class 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 for Congress’s violation of the Compensation Clause. The American Lawyer observed: “it’s hard to imagine a higher compliment than being hired to represent federal judges.” 

Deepak often leads high-stakes administrative and constitutional litigation as well. Among other things, he

• is representing Gwynne Wilcox, challenging her unprecedented removal from the National Labor Relations Board (Wilcox v. Trump);
• is representing the plaintiffs in a suit to prevent the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (NTEU v. Vought);
• persuaded the D.C. Circuit to issue a rare injunction on appeal halting a government takeover of the Open Technology Fund;
• represented environmental groups in a successful challenge to a midnight rule that would have crippled 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; and
• established that the Bureau of Land Management’s director was serving unlawfully for 424 days

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 Office of the Solicitor General on Supreme Court cases. Before that, he was an attorney at Public Citizen, where he founded the Consumer Justice Project and was 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.