Brian Steel

Brian Steel was born in Queens, New York, and took a business degree at the University of Michigan before law school at Fordham. He expected to become a tax attorney. During his final year, a professor brought him onto the retrial of a man accused of a killing that had happened a decade earlier. Steel sat at counsel table, and when the jury returned a guilty verdict he found he could not put the case down.

He applied for an internship at the Fulton County Public Defender's Office in Atlanta and was hired full time. He was leading murder trials in his twenties and taking appeals up the ladder while reading every case he could find. He also spent time in jail himself, so that he would understand what it was like for the people he was representing.

He moved into private practice in the early 1990s, and in 1997 he and his wife, Colette Resnik Steel, also a criminal defense attorney, founded The Steel Law Firm. The firm is small and has stayed small. He has said he does not advertise and does not take many clients, and that he stays close to the families of the people he represents because he has to believe in the person to defend them properly.

His practice has ranged from capital and violent felony work to tax evasion and complex white-collar matters, and his clients have included people with no means at all alongside public officials, physicians, law enforcement officers, and figures from the music industry. That last group arrived naturally: Atlanta became the commercial center of American rap, and he became the lawyer that people in that industry called.

He represented Jeffery Williams, the artist Young Thug, in the racketeering prosecution that became the longest trial in Georgia history, and was held in criminal contempt and jailed for refusing to disclose how he learned of a meeting between the presiding judge, prosecutors, and a key witness. The contempt order was reversed unanimously by the Georgia Supreme Court, and the judge was removed from the case. He later joined the defense of Sean Combs in Manhattan, where the jury acquitted on the most serious counts, and in 2026 he joined the defense in the federal murder-for-hire trial of Durk Banks in Los Angeles, where the jury returned not guilty verdicts on all five counts.

He does not drink, does not smoke, and does not use profanity in court. He is known among colleagues for preparation rather than performance, and he has said that what he wants is to help people, ethically and zealously, and that the system he works in is broken in ways he has seen at close range.

The surname is spelled Steel, not Steele, and no financial figure for him is published, which is set out in full under net worth.