The Deputy Attorney General advises and assists the Attorney General in formulating and implementing Departmental policies and programs and in providing overall supervision and direction to all organizational units of the Department. The Deputy Attorney General is authorized to exercise all the power and authority of the Attorney General, except where such power or authority is prohibited by law from delegation or has been delegated to another official. In the absence of the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General acts as the Attorney General.

Mark Filip was born in Chicago in 1966 and graduated from the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1988 with degrees in economics and history. After college, he attended the University of Oxford in England on a Marshall Scholarship, and graduated in 1990 with a B.A. in Law, First Class Honors. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. in 1992 and was an editor of the Law Review.

After law school, Filip served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. He worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago from 1995 to 1999. In that position he prosecuted cases in the trial and appellate courts involving a variety of offenses--including violent crimes, political, judicial, and police corruption, health care fraud, and international narcotics trafficking. While an AUSA, Filip received a Department of Justice Director's Award for Superior Performance as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

Following his service at the U.S. Attorney's Office, Filip was a partner in the Chicago office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. There, he practiced in a variety of areas of civil and criminal law, and also had a number of pro bono cases, including several cases representing indigent defendants in connection with the Federal Defender's Office in Chicago. Filip was nominated by President Bush to be a United States District Court Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, and, after being confirmed 96-0 by the Senate, he was sworn in to that office in March 2004. As a judge, he presided over numerous cases involving criminal, antitrust, securities fraud, immigration and other matters. Filip has taught for many years at the Law School of the University of Chicago, where he served from 2004 to March 2008 as the Bustin Lecturer and taught both advanced criminal law and first-year civil procedure.

Filip was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on March 3, 2008, and he was sworn in as Deputy Attorney General on March 10, 2008. Filip is married with four children.