Stephen J. Zralek

Stephen represents clients in courts and arbitral forums across the country, and he is routinely called on to serve as local counsel within Tennessee’s state and federal courts. He also serves as outside general counsel to multiple companies. Upon graduating from law school, Stephen served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Thomas A. Wiseman, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. He is a Fellow of both the Tennessee Bar Foundation and the Nashville Bar Foundation.

Stephen is an active member in the International Association of Defense Counsel (IADC), where he won the IADC’s 2023 President’s Award for his contributions to the organization. Within the IADC, he is a member of the International Arbitration Committee and serves on the Advisory Board to the International Corporate Counsel College, which is being held in London. He chaired the CLE Committee for the 2025 Midyear Meeting, and previously chaired the IP Committee. He is a frequent speaker and author on issues in business litigation, IP litigation, and litigating before the Tennessee Business Court. He has been quoted by USA Today, Managing IP, Young Entrepreneur, and IPWatchdog and featured in the ABA Journal. He co-authored “The Pro-IP Act: Another Weapon Against a Failing Economy,” published by the ABA’s Landslide magazine, as well as “Race is On to Recapture Copyrights,” published by The Tennessean, and co-authored an article published by Law360. Fellow attorneys routinely recognize him as one of the “Best of the Bar” within Nashville and the Southeast in peer-review rankings.

Stephen has presented at conferences hosted by, among others, the IADC, the Americana Music Festival, Music Biz, the American Bar Association, the Tennessee Bar Association, the Nashville Bar Association, the PR Society of America, the Nashville Business Journal, Lipscomb University, Vanderbilt University, the trial court judges of Davidson County and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

Through his active participation in TAGLaw, Stephen has developed personal relationships with lawyers across the country and the world. These valuable ties help the firm’s clients and attorneys when they need assistance with both business and litigation, knowing that Stephen can instantly connect them with trusted advisors who have been vetted ahead of time. Stephen represents Spencer Fane at TAG’s international conferences, and he is honored to serve as TAGLaw’s main contact for the firm’s Tennessee offices.

In the community, Stephen has served on and chaired many nonprofit boards in Nashville and has been a strong advocate his entire career for diversity and inclusion in both the legal profession and the city of Nashville. He helped inspire the Nashville Bar Association to amend its Creed of Professionalism to be more inclusive of non-white and female lawyers in the late 1990s; served on the steering committee of Nashville for All of Us in 2009, which defeated a referendum that would have prohibited any language other than English in communications by Nashville’s government; led a class action of primarily Black student-athletes to protect their right of publicity in a 2014 lawsuit; chaired the board of Nashville’s leading Latino nonprofit, Conexión Américas, from 2013 to 2015; and served as lead counsel for sexual abuse survivor Michelle Martin in her successful pursuit of clemency from Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam in 2019. After the horrific shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, Stephen helped form Voices for a Safer Tennessee.