Stephen Chahn Lee

Back in high school, I intended to become a doctor, just like my father, a radiologist who came to the United States from Korea. But I found myself drawn into the world of journalism as a reporter and as an editor. I worked for my weekly high school newspaper and my daily college newspaper, and I worked for the Chicago Tribune for more than a year before starting law school. While in law school, I covered many stories for the law school newspaper, including a murder trial and a trial about drug charges brought against a Columbia Law School graduate, and I quickly learned a lot by seeing evidence rules put into real-life practice.

After law school, I worked at the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, working closely with experienced former prosecutors on high-stakes investigations and cases. I first applied data analytics to my cases there, doing so long before anyone talked about “big data.” One of my most high-profile cases involved an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct that were made against the bishop of a Catholic diocese. I also worked on a matter involving a law-firm partner who ultimately was accused and convicted of fraud charges.

From 2008 to 2019, I served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Illinois. There, I had the honor and privilege to represent the United States in a wide variety of cases, including health care fraud, narcotics, mortgage fraud, bank robberies, and other cases. I won convictions in all 17 trials that I did as a prosecutor, I did more than 20 appellate arguments before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and I even appeared once before the United States Supreme Court in a case that I also had handled at the trial and appellate levels. At the same time, I understood that the prosecutor’s role is not to win convictions but to do the right thing the right way, something I took very seriously. I dismissed charges in three cases because I believed that the government’s evidence was not strong enough, and I refused to charge some people whom my law-enforcement partners wanted me to charge.

I left the federal government in early 2019 and worked at the Benesch law firm for just over three years. There, I worked on health care fraud matters, including representing a doctor in one of the biggest health care fraud cases ever brought against an individual. I did my first trial as a defense attorney less than a year after leaving the government, and I helped clear the doctor of two charges while also helping clear all of his co-defendants of all charges. I did this in part through finding flaws in the government’s use of data, and I also showed through cross-examination that two co-defendants did not attend a key meeting that the government had wrongly implied that the people had attended. While at Benesch, I also worked on various civil matters, including a large defamation case brought against a media company.

I started my solo practice in 2022, focused on helping people facing criminal charges involving healthcare fraud and the Anti-Kickback Statute. As a solo practitioner, I have more flexibility in terms of rates, and I believe I can offer high value efficiently and effectively, especially when it comes to criminal trials. As of September 2026, I have done seven trials in my solo practice. I have been lead counsel in four of the trials, and I was brought in by other attorneys to join an existing defense team shortly before three other cases went to trial.

Beyond my work as a lawyer, my life is woven with family, community involvement, and helping other lawyers with their cases and future lawyers with their career development. I also continue to do a lot of writing in my spare time. Back when I was starting out, I created a news website that was once called “smartly written and scrupulously sourced” in the New York Times. When I was a federal prosecutor, I wrote in my spare time an analysis of the Sherlock Holmes canon that led to my being invested in the Baker Street Irregulars, the premier Sherlock Holmes literary society in the United States. And I continue to write articles about a wide variety of topics, including health care fraud and investigative techniques.