About Justin M.
Justin M. Swartz earned his J.D. from DePaul College of Law in 1998. He is admitted to practice in both New York and Illinois. Those credentials underpin a career built around employment and civil-rights work, and an ongoing involvement in bar and professional associations.
After law school he moved into practice areas shaped by labor and employment issues. Over the years he has taken on organizational roles that align with those interests. He is a current co-chair of the Wage and Hour Committee at the National Employment Lawyers Association and serves on the executive board of NELA’s New York affiliate. Those positions put him in the center of contemporary wage-and-hour discussions and policy debates among plaintiff-side employment lawyers.
His association work extends beyond NELA. He holds membership in the American Constitution Society and in Americans United for Separation of Church and State, reflecting an engagement with constitutional and church-state questions. From 2005 to 2008 he served as co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Ethics & Professional Responsibility Committee. He also served on Association of the Bar of the City of New York panels, including the Civil Rights Committee from 2005 to 2008 and the Labor and Employment Law Committee from 2002 to 2005.
Those committee roles have been practical as well as organizational. He has steered program agendas, helped draft committee materials, and participated in continuing legal education panels. The combination of ethics work and employment law involvement gives him a particular grounding in how professional-responsibility issues intersect with litigation strategy and client counseling. He has engaged with rule-making and professional standards conversations at both the local and national levels.
Colleagues describe him as someone who moves easily between detailed statutory questions and broader policy discussions. He has repeatedly returned to wage-and-hour law as an area where those two strands meet: technical work on hourly-pay calculations and broader questions about enforcement and access to relief for workers. He also brings that approach to civil-rights concerns that arise in employment contexts.
He continues to practice in New York and Illinois, where his work concentrates on employment litigation, wage-and-hour claims, and civil-rights matters.
