You become an environmental lawyer the way you become any lawyer: lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination, and then the specialty is built on top.
The work the sources behind this page document runs from advisory work on rules, guidance and permits to enforcement litigation — and the employer mix the data measures is lawyers', not the specialty's.
This page maps what the work involves, who hires environmental lawyers, what background helps, and how lawyers break in.
What does an environmental lawyer do?
The job's content is easiest to see in the one environmental employer described in detail in the research behind this page: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of General Counsel.
Per the agency's own description of the office, EPA OGC attorneys advise EPA policymakers on rules and guidance, provide legal support for the issuance of permits and the approval of state environmental programs, and work with enforcement staff on litigation.
Federal attorney positions are classified in the GS-0905 General Attorney series, which covers trial work, legal advice to an agency, drafting regulations, contracts and legislative comments.
Read together, those two sources are the closest documented sketch of the specialty's shape: the functions EPA describes for OGC — advisory work on rules and guidance, permitting and program-approval support, and enforcement litigation — are one large environmental legal office's work, not a measured split for the field, and how much of each a seat carries can depend heavily on the employer.
Environmental practice is one of the named fields in our types of lawyers guide, and it sits inside the wider attorney careers landscape — the same license baseline, applied to a different body of statutes and programs.
What can vary by employer is the mix of advisory and adversarial work, which is why the employer question below matters as much as the subject matter.
Who hires environmental 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 environmental-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 where the subject matter is most visible in the sources behind this page: EPA's Office of General Counsel does the advisory, permitting and enforcement-support work described above, and federal agency attorney jobs sit in the GS-0905 series, filled outside the competitive-service examining process as Schedule A excepted-service appointments.
Among government lawyers generally, BLS's described titles include prosecutor, public defender and general counsel.
Firms with 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%: a big-firm end and a long small-firm tail.
Those counts describe all new graduates, not environmental 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 and NGO work is the piece this 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 define which employers NALP counts in that category, so read the 9.0% as the profession-wide public-interest share rather than a nonprofit-specific one.
For what a career in that segment looks like, see our public interest law guide.
What background and courses help environmental lawyers?
First, the license: the baseline is the lawyer baseline.
BLS's summary is that lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, which usually requires passing a bar examination, and no separately named environmental-law credential appears in the licensing requirements the sources behind this page describe — the specialty is built on top of the standard 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.
BLS's lawyer profile draws no equivalent link for environmental practice.
What the sources behind this page also do not do is measure how much a science degree or technical coursework matters to environmental employers — our research found no data quantifying that, so read the postings for the employers you actually want rather than any general claim about technical backgrounds.
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 course and activity choices, the levers the documented criteria name include academics, journal or advocacy participation, clinics, and relevant work history — the places where an environmental interest gets demonstrated rather than asserted.
- Electives your school offers in environmental, energy, natural-resources or administrative 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 environmental-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 federal agencies, the entry-level program the sources behind this page document in detail is the Department of Justice's Attorney General's Honors Program — DOJ's entry-level attorney recruitment program, running since 1953.
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.
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 state's environmental employers are realistically in reach.
Job market and demand
BLS publishes no count of environmental lawyers: it tracks the lawyer occupation as a whole and does not break employment out by practice area.
Any precise "number of environmental lawyers" or "environmental 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, and 84.6% held jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission — the highest share since NALP's current job classifications began in 2001.
BLS doesn't track pay for the specialty either.
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.
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.
All of these describe lawyers as an occupation, not environmental specialists.
Where to find environmental attorney jobs
Start wide: browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires to see current openings across employers, search more than one title, and 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.