Antitrust law — also called competition law — is the field that deals with how companies compete: mergers, agreements among rivals and disputes over market power.
You become an antitrust lawyer the way you become any lawyer: a law degree, then a state license, usually by passing the bar examination, with the specialty built on top.
This page maps the work, who hires — large firms, federal enforcement, in-house teams — and how lawyers break in.
What does an antitrust lawyer do?
Antitrust — often called competition law — is the field that deals with how companies compete.
Its work runs in two broad modes.
The advisory mode looks forward: lawyers review a proposed merger before it is signed, counsel a client on pricing, distribution or a joint venture, and assess whether an agreement with a competitor creates exposure.
The adversarial mode looks backward or sideways: government investigations and enforcement cases, and private litigation between companies over competitive conduct.
A caveat about the documentation behind this page: the research measures the profession, not the specialty's docket, so the closest documented sketch of the government side is the federal classification itself.
Attorneys at federal competition agencies are federal attorneys, and federal attorney jobs sit in the GS-0905 General Attorney series, which covers trial work, legal advice to an agency, and drafting regulations, contracts and legislative comments.
How much of a given seat is advisory versus adversarial depends on the employer and the matter load — which is why the employer question below matters as much as the subject matter.
Antitrust sits inside the wider attorney careers landscape — the same license baseline, applied to one body of competition questions.
Our types of lawyers guide profiles the practice areas with dedicated attorney roles and their own career paths; antitrust is not one of the profiled fields, so read postings for the mix you actually want: seats carrying the same title can be nearly all merger work, nearly all litigation, or a deliberate blend.
Who hires antitrust lawyers? Firms, government, in-house and nonprofits
Start with the honest caveat: BLS counts employers for lawyers as a whole, not by practice area.
In 2025 the largest employers of lawyers were legal services (52%), self-employed lawyers (11%), local government (8%), state government (7%) and federal government (5%).
BLS publishes no antitrust-only version of that table — which is also why nothing in this page's sources can tell you what share of the specialty each employer type takes.
Government is the segment where the subject matter is most visible in the sources behind this page.
Federal competition enforcement runs through the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and the DOJ is the employer the research documents in detail: the ABA's 2024 Profile counted the Justice Department as the employer of the most federal general attorneys — nearly 13,000 — and DOJ's Attorney General's Honors Program is its entry-level attorney recruitment program, running since 1953.
Federal attorney positions are filled outside the competitive-service examining process as Schedule A excepted-service appointments.
The FTC's own hiring programs are not documented in this page's sources, so check the agency's careers pages directly for its openings and deadlines.
On the private side, this page's sources carry no antitrust-specific employer counts: what exists is occupation-wide firm-size data.
Firms of more than 500 lawyers are the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed Class of 2025 graduates — and counting 251–500-lawyer firms, about one in four employed graduates started in a large firm.
Across all Class of 2025 law-firm jobs, firms of 501+ lawyers accounted for 33.2% and firms of 1–10 lawyers for 26.4%.
Those counts describe all new graduates, not antitrust hires specifically.
In-house legal departments show up in the business-sector data: among Class of 2024 graduates in business-sector jobs, in-house lawyer was the most common job type at 22.6% of business jobs — though only 32.6% of those business-sector jobs required bar admission, a reminder that some legal-adjacent corporate roles sit outside licensed practice.
Nonprofit work is the piece the data covers least directly: NALP's public-interest category took 9.0% of Class of 2025 jobs, and public service overall — government, public interest and judicial clerkships — accounted for 31.0%, but the sources behind this page don't identify antitrust-specific nonprofit employers.
For how the public and private sides compare day to day, see our government vs private practice guide.
What background and courses help antitrust lawyers?
First, the license: the baseline is the lawyer baseline.
BLS lists the typical entry-level education for lawyers as a doctoral or professional degree, and its summary is that lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination.
No separately named antitrust credential appears in the licensing requirements the sources behind this page describe — the specialty is built on top of the license, not beside it.
The comparison BLS itself draws is patent law: BLS notes patent lawyers typically need a degree, specific credits, or a background in science or engineering, and must pass an exam administered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The lawyer profile our research read draws no equivalent link for antitrust practice, and the sources behind this page do not measure how much any particular degree or coursework matters to antitrust employers — our research found no data quantifying that, so read the postings for the employers you actually want rather than any general claim about majors.
What is documented is what a major federal selector says it weighs.
DOJ lists its Honors Program selection criteria as commitment to government service, academics, leadership, journal/moot court/mock trial, clinics, past employment and relevant extracurriculars.
Translated into choices you make in school, the levers the documented criteria name are academics, journal or advocacy participation, clinics, and relevant work history — the places where an antitrust interest gets demonstrated rather than asserted.
If you are still weighing fields against each other, our guide to choosing a practice area walks that comparison.
- Electives your school offers in antitrust or competition law
- A clinic with real docket or client work you can name in interviews
- Journal, moot court or mock trial participation — named criteria in DOJ's Honors selection
- Summer positions in the offices you're targeting — BLS notes a successful summer job or internship may result in an offer after graduation
Licensing is set jurisdiction by jurisdiction
How do lawyers break into the field?
The entry levers the sources document are general rather than specialty-specific, because no antitrust-specific entry data exists in the research behind this page.
BLS notes a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation, and that judicial clerkships are typically 1- or 2-year terms some graduates take before practicing.
For the federal government, the entry-level program the sources document in detail is DOJ's Attorney General's Honors Program.
Eligibility is narrow: graduating law students and recent graduates who entered a judicial clerkship, graduate law program or qualifying legal fellowship within 9 months of graduation, and who meet additional eligibility requirements DOJ lists.
The window is short — for the 2026–2027 cycle, the application opened Aug 28, 2026 and closed Sept 8, 2026, submitted through DOJ's CORA system.
After the deadline, DOJ's published timeline runs interview invitations in early October, interviews from late October to mid-November, and offers from November on.
DOJ posts each cycle's window on its own site, so check it rather than assuming the dates repeat.
Two mechanical notes help applicants reading federal postings: federal "law clerk trainee" appointments exist for law graduates pending bar admission and may not exceed 14 months, and federal attorney hiring runs through the excepted service under Schedule A rather than competitive-service examining.
Calibrate expectations along two axes.
Federal hiring of new graduates fell sharply: NALP measured a 37.0% drop in graduates hired by the federal government excluding judicial clerkships, from nearly 1,100 in the Class of 2024 to about 690 in the Class of 2025 — so treat federal openings as one competitive path, not a plan with slack in it.
And geography compounds: 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the same state where they attended law school, so where you study shapes which employers are realistically in reach.
Job market and demand
BLS publishes no count of antitrust lawyers: it tracks the lawyer occupation as a whole and does not break employment out by practice area.
Any precise "number of antitrust lawyers" or "antitrust lawyer growth rate" figure you encounter therefore came from someone other than BLS — treat it accordingly.
What the primary sources do measure is the profession.
Lawyers held about 863,700 jobs in 2025.
BLS projects 5% employment growth from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, with about 28,700 openings a year on average over that span, many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.
BLS also expects some routine legal work to be automated but does not expect that to reduce overall demand for lawyers.
For the profession-wide outlook in depth, see our attorney job outlook article — this page stays on what the specialty can and cannot claim from the same data.
The entry-level market the Class of 2025 graduated into was strong by NALP's measures: 92.8% of graduates were employed about ten months after graduation, 84.6% held jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission — the highest share since NALP's current job classifications began in 2001 — and 60.9% of employed graduates took private-practice jobs, the highest share since the Class of 1990.
BLS's pay figures carry the same limitation: they describe the occupation, not the specialty.
Its median annual wage for lawyers was $159,670 in May 2025 (SOC 23-1011) — a figure that excludes self-employed lawyers and owners and partners of unincorporated businesses, so it describes neither solo nor partner income; the lowest 10% earned under $78,360 and the highest 10% over $351,600.
By sector, BLS's May 2025 medians were $178,380 in federal government, $157,870 in legal services, $131,390 in local government and $115,330 in state government.
Starting salaries are a different series: NALP's Class of 2025 private-practice median was $155,000; firm-size medians ranged from $84,000 at 1–10-lawyer firms to $225,000 at 500+.
NALP describes new-lawyer pay as bimodal: for the Class of 2024, 53.0% of salaries fell between $55,000 and $100,000, with a second peak at the prevailing BigLaw salary.
All of these figures describe lawyers as an occupation, not antitrust specialists.
Where to find antitrust attorney jobs
Start wide: browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires to see current openings across employers, and search more than one title.
Read each posting against the employer types in this page's second section: the advisory-to-litigation mix tells you which seat you're actually interviewing for.
For the general path this page specializes — college through law school, the bar and a first legal job, in order — see how to become a lawyer.
Career information, not legal advice. The licensing summary here is BLS's occupation-level description; confirm current bar admission requirements with the bar admission authority in your state.