Medical malpractice lawyers qualify the way lawyers typically do: a law degree and a state license — usually after passing a bar examination — with no malpractice-specific license in BLS's description of lawyer entry.
The specialty itself is built afterwards, on one side of medical injury disputes.
This page covers what the work involves, who hires these lawyers, and how new attorneys break into the field.
What does a medical malpractice lawyer do?
A medical malpractice lawyer is a civil litigator whose cases turn on medical care — whether treatment met the professional standards the parties argue over, and what harm followed when a patient says it did not.
The field divides by side.
Plaintiff-side lawyers represent patients and families bringing claims against health care providers; defense-side lawyers sit across the table, representing physicians, medical groups, hospitals and their insurers.
The two sides start from different doors.
Plaintiff work begins before any lawsuit, with case screening: reading medical records and consulting experts to judge whether the medicine can carry the claim.
Defense work begins with the claim itself: investigating the care at issue and building the record that answers it.
From there both sides run the same litigation machinery — written discovery, depositions of the treating physicians, motion practice, settlement negotiation and trial.
The specialty is expert-heavy: retaining, preparing and examining medical experts runs through the file on both sides, because the dispute is about what the care should have been, not only what happened.
The skill set follows from that.
Reading a chart fluently, examining a physician on the stand and translating clinical detail for a lay jury are the daily skills this work asks for, and it rewards lawyers who are comfortable with medicine and with the adversary process at the same time.
Within the site's types of lawyers map, this is one of the litigation specialties — the attorney careers hub holds the wider view.
Who hires medical malpractice lawyers?
BLS's employment data has no malpractice category — these lawyers are counted inside the profession-wide figures.
Per BLS, the largest employers of lawyers in 2025 were legal services (52%), self-employed lawyers (11%), local government (8%), state government (7%) and federal government (5%).
Search for the work under several labels — medical malpractice attorney, medical negligence attorney, medical lawyer — the titles name the same litigation practice.
Law firms.
Plaintiff and defense malpractice work can sit in small firms or in larger firms' litigation groups — our sources don't break firm size out by practice area, so the figures here are profession-wide.
The small-firm base is substantial: firms of 1–10 lawyers accounted for 26.4% of Class of 2025 law-firm jobs, and the American Bar Foundation's last census — 2005, still its latest — found 49% of private practitioners in solo practice, with 16.1% in firms of 101+ lawyers.
In-house.
Hospitals, health systems and insurers employ lawyers directly, and in-house is a real destination for lawyers generally: in NALP's Class of 2024 data, in-house lawyer was the most common job type in the business sector, at 22.6% of business jobs.
Read that as one graduating class at its ten-month mark — it shows the lane exists, not how a health system staffs its legal department years later.
Government.
BLS's titles for government lawyers include prosecutor, public defender and general counsel.
Federal attorney jobs are classified in the GS-0905 General Attorney series and sit in the excepted service under Schedule A (5 CFR 213.3102(d)), so agencies hire directly rather than through competitive examining.
On the federal side, the entry-level attorney program the Justice Department runs is the Attorney General's Honors Program — running since 1953, open to graduating law students and recent graduates who entered a judicial clerkship, graduate law program or qualifying legal fellowship within 9 months of graduation; its 2026–2027 application window ran from Aug 28 to Sept 8, 2026.
Which government offices carry health-care-related casework varies by jurisdiction — check an agency's own legal-careers pages for the current shape of its docket.
Nonprofits.
Public interest employers took 9.0% of Class of 2025 jobs, inside the 31.0% of jobs in public service overall (government 12.0%, judicial clerkships 10.0%).
A lane adjacent to this specialty is patient-safety and consumer-advocacy work, where lawyers press on the system rather than a single case.
What background and courses help?
In BLS's description, the formal entry has no specialty step in it.
BLS lists the typical entry-level education for lawyers as a doctoral or professional degree — law school — and describes the license as a state law license, usually obtained by passing a bar examination.
BLS's career handbook documents a separate credential for patent lawyers: a science or engineering background plus a USPTO-administered exam.
It describes no malpractice-specific step; the gate into this work is the same degree and license BLS describes for lawyers.
What you can shape is the toolkit.
Coursework that maps onto the practice includes torts, evidence, civil procedure and trial advocacy, plus health-law electives where a school offers them.
A clinic with live clients and a trial-competition team build the courtroom skills the work runs on — and these signals are not just folklore: the Justice Department says its Honors selection weighs journal, moot court/mock trial, clinics, past employment and relevant extracurriculars, a rare explicit list of the resume signals one federal legal employer reads for.
The nurse-attorney path
How do lawyers break into the field?
The entry-level market behind you, per NALP: 92.8% of Class of 2025 graduates were employed about ten months after graduation (measured March 16, 2026, covering more than 97% of graduates of ABA-accredited schools), 84.6% of the class got jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission, and 60.9% of employed graduates went into private practice, the sector whose firm-size split comes next.
Firm size spreads wide.
Firms of more than 500 lawyers were the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed Class of 2025 graduates — about one in four counting 251–500-lawyer firms — and 501+ firms held 33.2% of law-firm jobs, the large-firm end of the market.
At the other end, firms of 1–10 lawyers held 26.4% of law-firm jobs, the small-firm end.
The routes in are the profession's own.
A successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation, so it pays to aim that summer at the kind of practice you want.
A judicial clerkship — typically a 1- or 2-year term — is time inside a court before a firm job.
And going straight from the bar exam to your own practice is the rare route: only 174 Class of 2024 graduates started as solo practitioners, 0.8% of law-firm jobs.
Geography compounds it.
65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the same state where they attended law school, and for a court-anchored specialty that statistic doubles as advice: build the record where you are licensed and connected.
- Aim your 2L summer at litigation or personal-injury firms — a successful summer job can convert into a post-graduation offer.
- Put trial skills on the record: clinics, moot court and mock trial are criteria the Justice Department says it weighs in Honors selection.
- Weigh a judicial clerkship — typically a 1- or 2-year term inside a court before practice.
- Plan to start on someone else's cases: solo practice straight from the bar was a 0.8% share of law-firm jobs for the Class of 2024.
- Pick your state deliberately — 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked where they attended law school, and your license anchors the practice.
Job market and demand
The specialty has no employment series of its own.
BLS counts lawyers as one occupation (SOC 23-1011) — 863,700 jobs in 2025 — and does not break the profession out by practice area, so every number in this section describes lawyers as a whole, not malpractice work specifically.
The profession-wide outlook BLS projects: 5% employment growth from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, and 28,700 openings a year, on average, many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.
BLS also expects some routine legal work to be automated without reducing overall demand for lawyers.
Pay, profession-wide (BLS, May 2025): a $159,670 median annual wage for lawyers, with the lowest 10% earning under $78,360 and the highest 10% over $351,600.
Medians by industry: federal government $178,380; legal services $157,870; local government $131,390; state government $115,330.
One caveat travels with every BLS wage figure here: the data exclude self-employed lawyers and owners/partners of unincorporated businesses, so they do not describe solo or partner income — including the owners of malpractice firms.
New-graduate pay is a separate series, from NALP: a record $100,000 national median starting salary for the Class of 2025, and a $155,000 median in private practice — NALP's medians by firm size run from $84,000 at 1–10-lawyer firms to $225,000 at 500+.
No malpractice-specific pay figure exists
Where to find medical malpractice lawyer jobs
Openings across the specialty — plaintiff-side firms, defense and insurance litigation, hospital and health-system counsel — post under the attorney listings.
Browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires to see which firms are hiring in your city and state.
Defense-side work can also appear under litigation and insurance-defense titles, so read those listings too when you search — and if you are still in school, the recruiting channels in the break-in section above are where a first offer can come from.
Career information, not legal advice. Degree and licensing requirements are set by each state's bar admission authority — confirm current steps there before you plan around anything on this page.