David John Marshall

“Fighting against injustice and unfair business practices has been the main focus of my life for nearly forty years.

The best moments in my career have been when I could stand alongside a hard-working person or their family and fight like hell to get them their due, whether I was working with coal miners defending their livelihoods, or representing a nuclear worker who got fired for raising safety concerns, or representing a CFO or an accountant who stuck his neck out to stop fraud on taxpayers or investors. Representing deserving individuals against wealthy corporations is what energizes me more than anything else, and I get to do it every day. That’s why I love my job.”

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Recognized as a top whistleblower and employment lawyer by Washingtonian Magazine and other peer-reviewed publications, David J. Marshall has successfully represented hundreds of whistleblowers and other employees, including those in the nuclear, financial, pharmaceutical and medical-device industries, as well those alleging fraud in government contracts. He is rated by Martindale-Hubbell as “AV Preeminent,” its highest possible peer review rating.

Mr. Marshall is a founding partner of Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP, where he concentrates his practice on a wide range of corporate whistleblower claims, including under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and False Claims Acts. Since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, Mr. Marshall has also established himself as a leading lawyer representing whistleblowers in the Securities Exchange Commission’s new Whistleblower Program. He has achieved significant recent success in whistleblower cases against the Architect of the Capitol and Deutsche Bank, at TVA’s Brown’s Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama, and against the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. In addition to his work as a whistleblower lawyer, Mr. Marshall has successfully represented plaintiffs in sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and other discrimination cases, and has extensive experience in the negotiation of complex executive employment and separation contracts.

From 1981 to 1984 Mr. Marshall practiced as a staff attorney with the Political Rights Defense Fund, where he represented trade unionists and political activists nationwide in civil liberties, free speech, defamation, and political asylum litigation. He then worked as a steelworker, garment worker, freight railroad conductor, and refinery worker for 12 years, and was a rank-and-file union activist in some of the nation’s largest industries and unions. He returned to the full-time practice of law in Washington, D.C., in 1997.

Mr. Marshall has appeared in numerous national and local media. He speaks frequently at legal conferences as an expert on whistleblower law, has written extensively on employment and whistleblower issues, and has provided comments and training to government agencies regarding pending changes to the nation’s whistleblower laws. 

In addition to his legal practice, Mr. Marshall serves on a number of non-profit boards and committees. He was appointed this year to serve as the whistleblower-side co-chair of the American Bar Association Labor and Employment Section’s Subcommittee on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. He is a member of the steering committee of the Shelley Davis Memorial Fund, which endows an attorney position at Farmworker Justice, the nation’s premier legal-advocacy group fighting for the rights of farmworkers. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Public Justice Foundation, an organization that uses litigation to advance consumers’ rights, workers’ rights, public health and safety, and access to the courts. He also serves on the advisory board of the Government Accountability Project, a leading whistleblower rights organization. 

Mr. Marshall received his Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, from Emory University, and his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude.