Steve Dettelbach serves as firmwide Chair of BakerHostetler’s Litigation Practice Group and also serves on the firm’s Policy Committee. Steve rejoined BakerHostetler in April 2025 after serving as only the second-ever Senate-confirmed Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He is chair of our firm’s 400-plus lawyer firmwide Litigation Group and is a partner in the White Collar, Investigations and Securities Enforcement and Litigation team, which he also led from 2016 to 2022. He served from 2009 to 2016 as the presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. Mr. Dettelbach has never lost a federal criminal trial.
In his more than three-decade career, Steve has handled many of the nation’s most challenging and important legal, business, regulatory, enforcement and policy matters, both from the private sector and government perspectives. Many of his engagements involve existential stakes for the parties involved.
Steve has represented CEOs, advised boards, appeared in courts all over the nation, testified multiple times before Congress, led a more than 5,000-person/$1.6 billion law enforcement and regulatory agency, litigated high-stakes business disputes and completed extensive public interest work for a wide array of clients.
In addition to his leadership and advisory experience, Steve’s skills as a practicing lawyer are widely sought after. In his career, Steve has dealt with investigations or legal disputes in every state and numerous countries. He is known as a trial lawyer who is both willing and able to fight for his clients – and to fight hard.
Steve began his career as a law clerk to The Honorable Stanley Sporkin in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and later served as counsel on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. He also handled dozens of complex federal investigations and trials during his years as a career prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division and three different U.S. Attorney’s Offices. These foundational experiences laid the groundwork for his significant contributions to client service and public service.
