A mass tort or class action lawyer handles litigation brought by many people over the same product, device or event — one lawsuit on a group's behalf, or many individual claims run in a coordinated way.
You become one the way you become any lawyer: a professional law degree, a state license usually earned by passing the bar examination — then litigation experience, since the sources behind this page record no separate specialty track.
This page maps the work, who hires, and how lawyers break in.
What does a mass tort and class action lawyer do?
Mass tort and class action work is litigation built for scale: instead of one client with one dispute, the matters involve many people claiming harm from the same source — a drug or medical device, a consumer product, a disaster, or a company's conduct over time.
The umbrella covers two related forms.
In broad strokes, a class action is a single case pursued on behalf of a group, while mass tort practice handles many individual claims that share a common thread and coordinates them so the work is not rebuilt from zero for every claimant.
Plaintiff-side lawyers represent the claimants, and the job runs on two levels at once.
The first is the individual claim: each client's injuries, evidence and damages.
The second is the coordination layer, where strategy, discovery and expert work are developed once and applied across the group — the layer that makes this practice distinctive.
The defense side is the mirror image: lawyers at firms and inside companies who represent the manufacturers and other businesses facing those claims.
Same subject matter, opposite client.
Day to day, expect litigation work at volume: client intake and communication across many claimants, document-heavy discovery, expert witnesses, motion practice and settlement discussions.
On hours, the sources document lawyers generally, not this specialty: BLS notes most lawyers work full time and some work more than 40 hours a week.
One documentation note shapes this page: the research behind it measures the profession, not this specialty's docket, so the description above stays at the level the sources support — no docket counts, and no procedure or rule names the sources don't record.
For where this field sits alongside the others, our types of lawyers guide profiles the practice areas with dedicated career paths.
Who hires mass tort and class action 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%).
No mass-tort-only version of that table exists in this page's sources, so read the rest of this section as the market's shape rather than a count of this specialty's desks.
Private practice is where the firm-size data sits.
NALP's firm-size counts put firms of more than 500 lawyers first: the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed Class of 2025 graduates — and adding 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 cover all new graduates; the sources don't split them into plaintiff and defense work.
Government is the piece this page's research documents least for this specialty.
BLS describes government lawyers' titles as including prosecutor, public defender and general counsel, and federal attorney jobs sit in the GS-0905 General Attorney series — per the ABA's 2024 Profile of the Legal Profession, the Justice Department employed the most general attorneys, nearly 13,000 of them.
But the hiring data we read is profession-wide, and it argues against overselling federal openings: NALP counted new graduates hired by the federal government (excluding judicial clerkships) fall 37.0%, from nearly 1,100 in the Class of 2024 to about 690 in the Class of 2025.
In-house teams show up in the business-sector data: among NALP's Class of 2024 graduates in business-sector jobs, in-house lawyer was the most common job type at 22.6% — though only 32.6% of those business-sector jobs required bar admission, so most of them did not.
Nonprofit work rounds out the picture least directly: public interest organizations took 9.0% of NALP's Class of 2025 jobs, part of a 31.0% public-service total that also includes government (12.0%) and judicial clerkships (10.0%), and the sources behind this page identify no specialty-specific nonprofit employers.
This whole map is one slice of the employer picture on our attorney careers hub.
What background and courses help?
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 mass tort or class action credential appears in the licensing sources behind this page — the specialty is built on top of the license, not beside it.
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.
The lawyer profile our research read draws no equivalent link for this field, and none of the sources quantify how much any particular degree or course matters to the employers hiring for it — so read postings for the seats you actually want rather than any general claim about majors.
What is documented is what one 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.
That is one employer's stated list for entry-level attorney hiring, not a profession-wide checklist — but it names the levers a student controls: academics, advocacy competition experience, clinics and work history.
If you are still weighing fields against each other, our guide to choosing a practice area walks that comparison.
- Electives your school offers in complex litigation, class actions or torts
- A clinic with real client or docket 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 mass-tort-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.
Where graduates actually land supports the firm-first picture: NALP counted 60.9% of employed Class of 2025 graduates in private-practice jobs, the highest share since the Class of 1990.
Geography shapes the search: NALP found 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates working in the same state where they attended law school — so the school-and-market pairing you choose frames which employers are realistically in reach.
In the federal government, the structured entry program this research documents in detail is DOJ's Attorney General's Honors Program, its entry-level attorney recruitment program 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.
The window is short — for the 2026–2027 cycle, the application opened Aug 28, 2026 and closed Sept 8, 2026 — and DOJ's published timeline then 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.
For the specialty itself, our research documents no separate certification, exam or standardized entry track — on this page's evidence, the path runs through a litigation job first, then the field.
That makes the first litigation employer, and the discovery and trial record built there, the practical credential this page can point to.
Treat the 37.0% federal drop noted above as a reminder to keep several tracks open rather than one.
Job market and demand
BLS publishes no count of mass tort or class action lawyers: it tracks the lawyer occupation as a whole and does not break employment out by practice area.
Any precise "number of mass tort lawyers" or specialty growth rate you encounter therefore came from somewhere other than BLS — treat it accordingly.
What the primary sources 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.
The newest entry-level read was strong: 92.8% of NALP's Class of 2025 was 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.
Pay carries the same limitation: the figures describe the occupation, not the specialty.
BLS's median annual wage for lawyers was $159,670 in May 2025 (SOC 23-1011) — the lowest 10% earned under $78,360 and the highest 10% over $351,600 — and those figures exclude self-employed lawyers and owners and partners of unincorporated businesses, so they describe neither solo nor partner income.
Starting salaries are a different series: NALP's Class of 2025 national median was a record $100,000, up from $95,000 for the Class of 2024, and its private-practice median was $155,000; firm-size medians range from $84,000 at 1–10-lawyer firms to $225,000 at firms of 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 — so read the two as different measures — wages across the whole occupation versus starting salaries for new graduates — not as one number.
How plaintiff-side firms charge for this work is one more thing the sources don't quantify.
Where to find attorney jobs
Mass tort and class action openings are posted as attorney jobs, so the practical search is the attorney board itself.
Browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires to see current openings, and read each posting against the employer types above — claimant-side firms, defense-side practices, in-house teams and the government programs — to tell which seat you're actually interviewing for.
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.