Marc Cote

Marc Cote is a Seattle employment lawyer and mediator with a strong reputation for achieving excellent results for clients from all walks of life. For the last ten years, he has devoted most of his practice to employment law. During that time, he has successfully litigated several groundbreaking class actions on behalf of delivery drivers, restaurant workers, farm workers, construction workers, fruit packing workers, and catering servers. Marc has also successfully represented lawyers, doctors, tech professionals, and other professionals in severance negotiation, employment discrimination, and employment exit matters. He also advises small businesses on employment policies and employee discipline.

Marc serves on the mediator panel for the Washington Arbitration and Mediation Service (WAMS). As a mediator, he works tirelessly to get parties to resolution so that they can avoid the expense, uncertainty, stress, and emotional toll of litigation. Marc has successfully assisted parties in resolving disputes involving allegations of disability accommodation, gender discrimination, age discrimination, and pregnancy discrimination. He has a knack for assessing risk and helping parties make reasoned decisions to reach pragmatic resolutions of their disputes. In early 2020, he attended the “Mediating the Litigated Case” program through the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University School of Law. He is a certified neutral on the ADR panel for the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and a pro bono mediator for the EEOC. Marc’s considerable experience litigating class action cases has given him a keen sense of the ins and outs of class action settlement structure and the settlement approval process under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 and Washington State Civil Rule 23. 

Before entering private practice, Marc served as a law clerk to the Honorable Walter L. Carpeneti of the Alaska Supreme Court. He graduated second in his class at the University of Washington School of Law, where he served as Executive Articles Editor of the Washington Law Review. While in law school, he also served as a judicial extern to the Honorable Ricardo Martinez of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Marc speaks Spanish and enjoys representing Spanish-speaking clients.