Jessica Paulie Weber

Jessie Weber’s practice includes cases involving disability rights, civil rights, housing discrimination, wage and hour violations, and appeals. Jessie’s successes include winning an arbitration award of more than $250,000 on behalf of an African-American former Hooters server who was fired from her job because of Hooters’ racially discriminatory image policy and securing an injunction requiring the Maryland Board of Elections to make its online ballot-marking tool available to voters with disabilities. She also helped obtain a $1.25 million settlement for a class of Baltimore City school bus drivers and attendants who were wrongly denied overtime and regular pay for all hours worked.

Jessie represents clients in appellate courts throughout the country and has argued in the Fourth, Sixth, and D.C. Circuits.  She has also handled LGBTQ rights cases involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression in contexts ranging from employment to health insurance discrimination to students’ exercise of their First Amendment rights.

Since 2014, Jessie has been chosen annually for inclusion on the Super Lawyers‘ Maryland Rising Stars list, an honor reserved for those lawyers 40 years old or younger or in practice for ten years or less, who exhibit excellence in practice.  Only 2.5 percent of the attorneys in Maryland are named to the Rising Stars list each year. Jessie was also chosen to receive The Daily Record’s 2017 VIP Award, given to professionals 40 years of age and younger who were selected on the basis of professional accomplishments, community service, and commitment to inspiring change. In 2013, Jessie was given The Daily Record’s Leading Women Award, which honors 50 women, who are 40 years of age or younger, for the accomplishments they have made so far in their careers.

A client of Jessie’s recently wrote on Avvo, “My organization, KIPP DC, hired Jessie in an administrative matter with civil rights implications. Jessie’s work ethic, intellect, and work product were unparalleled. Jessie accomplished more in a short period of time than a team of attorneys could have managed in twice as long, so it’s unsurprising that Jessie’s excellent work led to a favorable outcome. Notably, numerous individuals within my organization read Jessie’s brief in our matter and commented that it was the best written product they had read in a year. I also appreciated Jessie’s responsiveness — I never had to question our progress on any front. You can’t find a better attorney than Jessie.”

Prior to joining the firm, Jessie served as the 2010-2011 Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr. Appellate Advocacy Fellow at the Public Justice Center in Baltimore, where she represented clients and authored amicus briefs in federal and Maryland appellate courts on a variety of civil rights and anti-poverty issues.

After law school, Jessie clerked for the Honorable Catherine C. Blake on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

During law school, Jessie served as a Submissions Editor for both the Yale Law & Policy Review and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. She worked extensively in the area of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights as co-director of Yale’s LGBT Rights Litigation Clinic and as a legal intern with the ACLU LGBT and HIV/AIDS Rights Project and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Jessie also volunteered with the D.C. Employment Justice Center’s Workers’ Rights Clinic and Loyola Law School’s Hurricane Katrina Legal Clinic.

As an undergraduate, Jessie won the Spirit of Princeton Award in recognition of her leadership in campus activism.