Empowering Employees and Creators, Championing Dreams
Marni Willenson is the founder of Willenson Law, LLC and its member and manager. She is a nationally recognized litigation attorney and has dedicated her nearly three-decade career to remedying discrimination and wage theft. She has obtained tens of millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements and secured jobs for dozens of Chicago firefighters and paramedics to remedy sex and disability discrimination.
Ms. Willenson is a 1996 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. As an undergraduate, she studied at the University of Costa Rica in San Jose. She worked as a Chicago Public School teacher before enrolling in law school. After graduating law school, she was selected as a Fellow of the Skadden Fellowship Foundation to work at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She later became a shareholder at a private civil rights law firm and then returned to the non-profit sector as litigation coordinator of Farmworker Justice. At Farmworker Justice, she represented agricultural workers in class action wage theft litigation.
In 2010, Ms. Willenson founded Willenson Law, LLC to continue filing civil rights and wage theft lawsuits. The firm’s work for the past 15 years has focused on complex employment discrimination litigation. Ms. Willenson has litigated multiple lawsuits for firefighters, paramedics, police officers, correctional officers, and applicants for these critical public safety jobs, recovering tens of millions of dollars in verdicts and settlement and securing jobs, retroactive seniority, and pension benefits for her clients. Her groundbreaking litigation has led to the end of invalid and discriminatory testing used to exclude qualified women and people with disabilities from jobs as firefighters and paramedics.