You become an aviation lawyer the way you become any lawyer: BLS's summary is that lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination, and the specialty is built on that baseline.
The work people mean by the title runs in three directions — regulatory counseling, aircraft finance and leasing, and the litigation that follows accidents.
Here is what the job involves, who hires, and how lawyers break in.
What does an aviation lawyer do?
Aviation law is a subject area, not a separate license: nothing in the sources behind this page describes a separately named aviation-law credential, and the work takes the same law degree and state license behind the wider attorney careers landscape and aims them at the air-travel industry.
Our types of lawyers guide describes the pattern for fields that sit at the overlap between law and another industry — entertainment and environmental practice among them — and aviation follows it: a named subject area layered on top of the litigation-versus-transactional axes.
The first strand is regulatory.
On the government side, the FAA's Office of the Chief Counsel is the documented example: its attorneys advise the agency and represent it before the NTSB, the MSPB, the EEOC, DOT administrative law judges and the federal courts.
Agency-side work in that office — legal advice to the agency plus litigation and dispute representation across those forums — is the aviation regulatory practice this page's research actually documents.
The second strand is transactional: buying, selling, leasing and financing aircraft, and negotiating the contracts that move equipment between owners, operators and lenders.
The underlying doctrine is commercial and secured-lending practice applied to airframes — what makes the work "aviation" is the asset and the industry around it, not a separate license.
The third strand is litigation, the one the public picture of the field starts from: when an accident happens, disputes can follow, and the parties on either side of an aviation case can include airlines, manufacturers, insurers and the businesses around them.
The work runs like other complex civil litigation — through pleadings, discovery and trial — with technical subject matter as the difference.
A data note before the rest of this page: BLS does not break the lawyer profession out by practice area, so no source here measures how the field divides among those three strands — treat any precise split you encounter as unverified.
If you are still deciding between fields, our choosing a practice area guide walks that decision; the rest of this page assumes you have picked this one.
Who hires aviation lawyers? Firms, government, in-house and nonprofits
Start with the caveat the data imposes: BLS counts employers for lawyers as a whole and has no aviation line.
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%).
What follows is the employer structure the industry shows, with the specialty-specific gaps said plainly.
Firms are the first private-sector destination.
60.9% of employed Class of 2025 graduates took private-practice jobs — the highest share since the Class of 1990 — and firms of more than 500 lawyers are the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed graduates; counting 251–500-lawyer firms, about one in four started in a large firm.
Those counts describe all new graduates, not aviation hires — but they say where entry-level seats concentrate, and industry-facing practices sit inside that structure.
In a search, look for firms that advertise aviation, aerospace or transportation work rather than assuming a firm size.
Government is the employer with the cleanest documentation in this field's research: the FAA's Office of the Chief Counsel, whose attorneys advise the agency and represent it before the NTSB, the MSPB, the EEOC, DOT administrative law judges and the federal courts.
Keep the size of that door in proportion — federal government was 5% of lawyer employment in BLS's 2025 employer table, and NALP counted new-graduate federal hiring (excluding judicial clerkships) down 37.0% for the Class of 2025.
Agency seats are worth targeting as one option, not as the plan.
In-house legal departments are the other private-sector destination: a company's own lawyers handle the company's regulatory, transactional and litigation matters.
NALP's business-sector data measures the Class of 2024 graduates who took 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 legal-adjacent corporate roles exist outside licensed practice.
No source behind this page breaks those business-sector figures out by industry, so they cannot say how many sat at aviation companies.
Nonprofits and industry associations complete the picture as the policy side of the same regulatory and liability questions.
None of the sources behind this page quantifies these offices or their aviation hiring, so treat the segment as an option to research employer by employer, not a measured market.
What background and courses help aviation lawyers?
The baseline is the lawyer baseline.
BLS lists the typical entry-level education for lawyers as a doctoral or professional degree, and its licensing summary is that lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination.
Aviation practice is built on that license like any other specialty — nothing in the sources behind this page describes a separately named aviation-law credential.
BLS does name one specialty with extra requirements, 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.
Nothing in the BLS material behind this page draws an equivalent link for aviation practice.
What the sources also do not do is measure how much any particular degree or coursework matters to aviation employers — our research found no data quantifying that, so read the postings for the employers you actually want.
What a law-school record can control is the raw material each strand runs on.
Regulatory work reads like administrative law; the transactional strand reads like contracts, commercial law, secured transactions and finance; the litigation strand leans on evidence, civil procedure and trial advocacy.
None of those courses is an aviation credential — they are the general toolkit the industry's problems arrive in.
- Electives your school offers in administrative law, contracts, commercial law, secured transactions and finance
- A clinic or practicum with live client work you can name in interviews
- Journal, moot court or negotiation-competition participation
- Summer positions in the offices you're targeting — BLS notes a successful summer job or internship may result in an offer of employment 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 aviation-specific entry data exists in the research behind this page.
BLS notes that 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 taken by some graduates before working as a lawyer.
Both run through someone else's office first — which is the pattern this section follows.
Direct entry can happen: a firm's aviation, aerospace or transportation practice can hire a new graduate, and an agency legal office can too.
The other route in is lateral — early years in general commercial litigation or corporate work, then a move toward industry clients once the underlying skills are portable.
The research behind this page documents the first destination statistically — private practice took 60.9% of employed Class of 2025 graduates — but does not measure how aviation practices divide their hiring between new graduates and laterals.
Geography compounds all of it.
65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the same state where they attended law school, so where you study shapes which market you can realistically reach.
No source behind this page measures where aviation work concentrates by city or region — treat any list of aviation hubs as reputation rather than measurement, and let the postings you want tell you where to be.
The federal door deserves the same calibration: NALP counted new graduates hired by the federal government, excluding judicial clerkships, down 37.0% for the Class of 2025, from nearly 1,100 to about 690.
That is the entry-level federal market an agency-hopeful graduates into — target the FAA's office if that is the work you want, but hold more than one door open.
Job market and demand
BLS publishes no count of aviation lawyers: it tracks the lawyer occupation as a whole and does not break employment out by practice area.
Any precise "number of aviation lawyers" or "aviation 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.
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 — the second-highest rate on record — and 84.6% held jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission, the highest share since NALP's current job classifications began in 2001.
None of those figures isolates aviation work, so the honest answer to "is the specialty growing" is that its growth is unmeasured; what is measured is a profession with steady projected demand.
BLS does not break lawyers out by practice area, so its figures carry no specialty pay line.
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.
NALP's separate starting-salary series is a different measure: the Class of 2025 national median starting salary was $100,000, and the private-practice median was $155,000.
All of these figures describe lawyers as an occupation, not aviation specialists.
Where to find aviation lawyer jobs
Start wide: browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires to see current openings across employers, and search more than one title — industry-facing seats can post under litigation, corporate, transportation or aerospace headings rather than "aviation lawyer".
Read each posting against the three strands in this page's first section and the employer types in the second: whether a seat is regulatory, deal-side or dispute-side tells you what you would actually be doing.
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 and pay figures here are occupation-level summaries; confirm current bar admission requirements with the bar admission authority in your state.