Michael Thakur

Michael Thakur joined Baron & Budd as a shareholder in 2025. Mr. Thakur is part of the firm’s Opioid Litigation group, which represents state and local governments in lawsuits to recover damages caused by corporate wrongdoing in the opioid crisis.

Michael Thakur is an experienced trial attorney who, before joining the firm, served for almost 15 years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. “My work at Baron & Budd is in many ways a continuation of the type of work I did as a prosecutor, holding corporations and people accountable for clear violations of the law and helping protect the rights of victims and the public.”

At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Thakur prosecuted a wide range of cases: wire fraud, credit card fraud, and investor fraud; international narcotics trafficking; and numerous violent crime and gun trials. He also worked on global money laundering investigations and sensitive national security matters involving terrorism and foreign espionage.

For two years, Mr. Thakur was a deputy chief of Major Crimes, supervising prosecutors in the most trial-intensive section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He then spent eight years in the National Security section, where he successfully led a trial team in a case against an unlicensed exporter who violated commercial and military export controls. Mr. Thakur has briefed and argued multiple cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. From 2023 to 2024, he was on detail to a Special Counsel’s Office involved in the investigation and prosecution of a former head of state. In an opinion article published in the Miami Herald in February 2025, a former U.S. Magistrate Judge praised Mr. Thakur as “one of Miami’s finest federal prosecutors” and “one of the best to appear before me and my colleagues on the bench.”

Michael Thakur graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in economics, and received the John Harvard scholarship for academic achievement. He was also a National Hispanic Scholar. He graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an Editor of the Harvard Law Review and a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership by then-Dean Elena Kagan. After law school, Mr. Thakur clerked for the Honorable Stanley Marcus on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Mr. Thakur’s interest in the law began early on. He was not yet a teenager when he began poring over the U.S. Constitution and American history to help quiz his father, who was studying to pass the U.S. citizenship test. “The law, at its best,” Michael Thakur says, “is a force for good. The law lifts up Americans against injustices and provides a beacon of hope for those who have been harmed.”

Michael Thakur was an inaugural trustee of Awesome Foundation Miami, a micro-grant program that supports local civic projects. He also was chosen for several leadership programs, including the Miami Fellows Program through the Miami Foundation and the statewide Connect Florida, hosted by Leadership Florida.

These days, when not focused on the law, Mr. Thakur enjoys traveling with his wife and visiting National Parks; playing amateur soccer with his two young sons; and trying to find his boys in occasionally intense rounds of hide and seek around the house.