• Bachelor of Arts, Ohio Wesleyan University, 1997
• Juris Doctor, University of Virginia School of Law, 2001
• Law Clerk to the Hon. Jerry E. Smith, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 2001-2002
• Associate, Brown & Bain, PA, 2002-2005
• Law Clerk to the Hon. Terrence O’Donnell, Ohio Supreme Court, 2005-2006
• Associate, Vorys, Sater, Seymour, and Pease, LLP, 2006-2011
• Adjunct Professor of Appellate Advocacy, Ohio State University College of Law, 2019-2022
• Chief Deputy Solicitor General, Ohio Attorney General’s Office, 2011-present

During his tenure as Chief Deputy Solicitor General, Hendershot has been a primary defender of Ohio’s most aggressive efforts to restrict voting rights—defending the elimination of same-day registration, the rollback of early voting hours, and partisan gerrymanders so extreme that the Ohio Supreme Court rejected them five consecutive times.

• Hendershot represented Ohio in a challenge by the Ohio Democratic Party against then-Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, defending a law that eliminated same-day voter registration and in-person voting. The Ohio Democratic Party argued that this change violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and presented evidence that African American voters disproportionately relied on this same-day registration window.

• Hendershot served as co-counsel and “contributed substantially” to briefs in a lawsuit challenging Ohio’s decision to reduce early voting from 35 to 29 days and eliminate Sunday and evening voting hours. The NAACP and other plaintiffs argued these reductions violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by disproportionately burdening African American and lower-income voters.

• Although lower federal courts initially blocked the early voting cuts, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency 5-4 stay that allowed the reduced schedule to proceed for the 2014 midterm elections.

• Hendershot acted as the primary defense attorney for the Republican statewide officials serving on the Redistricting Commission in a challenge by the League of Women Voters of Ohio following the 2020 Census. They argued that the newly drawn state legislative maps were extreme partisan gerrymanders designed to lock in a Republican supermajority, violating a 2015 anti-gerrymandering amendment added to the Ohio Constitution by voters.

• Hendershot aggressively pushed back against the Ohio Supreme Court’s demands for strict partisan proportionality and argued that the Court was exceeding its constitutional authority by attempting to micromanage the map-drawing process.

• After years of litigation, a bipartisan majority of the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the Commission’s submitted legislative maps five separate times, ruling that they unconstitutionally favored the Republican Party out of proportion to the state’s actual voting preferences.

Hendershot was involved in several high-profile appellate fights opposing LGBTQIA+ rights during his tenure as Chief Deputy Solicitor General, including attacks on the transgender community and fighting against marriage equality.

• Hendershot defended Ohio in a case challenging the state’s ban on transgender individuals amending the gender marker on their birth certificates, one of only three states to do so at the time. A federal judge invalidated the policy as unconstitutional in December 2020, and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office ultimately declined to appeal the ruling.

• Hendershot signed a multi-state amicus brief in the Sixth Circuit supporting a challenge against an Ohio school district that had implemented a policy prohibiting the intentional misgendering of transgender students. When a federal court suggested that students who objected could simply avoid using pronouns altogether, the brief pushed back, arguing that pronoun usage is a “virtual necessity” in daily life and that forcing students to either use preferred pronouns or avoid pronouns entirely is an unconstitutional violation of their free speech.

• During the 2024 Supreme Court battles over whether states can dictate how social media platforms moderate content, Hendershot contributed to an amicus brief arguing that platforms unfairly censor conservative speech. The brief explicitly singled out “transgender issues” as a primary example of this alleged censorship, complaining that technology companies suppress conservative viewpoints regarding “separate bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams,” “appropriate medical care,” and debates over “the nature of what it means to be male or female.”

• As Chief Deputy Solicitor General, Hendershot is the second-in-command of the state’s appellate division, which entails playing a central role in crafting and managing the appellate strategy for Ohio’s most contentious legal battles. In high-profile cases, Ohio’s Solicitor General is typically the counsel of record. Hendershot is not explicitly listed as counsel in the following two cases, but because of his role was likely involved in strategic decision-making:

• During Hendershot’s time in this role, Ohio was the lead state defendant in Obergefell v. Hodges. Hendershot was Chief Deputy Solicitor General from 2011 onward and was serving in that role throughout the entire arc of Ohio’s defense of its same-sex marriage ban—including the 2013 district court rulings against Ohio, the 2014 Sixth Circuit decision upholding the bans (later reversed by the Supreme Court), and  the 2015 Supreme Court briefing and oral argument in which Ohio urged the Court to allow states to deny recognition of same-sex marriages.

• Also during Hendershot’s time in this role, the Ohio Solicitor General’s Office defended a gender affirming care ban and a ban on the participation of transgender girls and women in school sports. H.B. 68, enacted by veto-override in January 2024, bans puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender youth and bars transgender girls from school sports. Governor DeWine vetoed the law, stating that it would have the state override parents and physicians on deeply personal medical decisions—a veto the legislature overrode.

• The Ohio Solicitor General’s Office defended H.B. 68 across all levels of state-court review, including at the Ohio Supreme Court (oral arguments were held in early 2026). The office’s litigating position has been that parents have no constitutional right to access gender-affirming care for their children when the legislature has deemed it “wrongdoing,” and that children have no “deeply rooted right to get gender reassignment treatments.”

Hendershot participated in litigation led by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, as part of a multi-state effort, to block the Biden Administration’s 2024 Title IX rules that expanded sex-based discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity.