Practicing as a Competition Lawyer in the 21st Century

While often called “antitrust” lawyers, the term “competition” better favors what such lawyers do because it more broadly captures the practice in the 21st century. The term “antitrust” initially was hyphenated as “Anti-Trust” when the original federal acts, like the Sherman Act were passed at the turn of the 20th century to deal with the big oil, railroad and steel trusts, for example. Although the term — without the hyphen — is now used more broadly, it is still too narrow to capture the practice area. That is because the practice today includes federal, state and international issues plus a myriad of related economic, academic and policy issues.

Outside of the United States, lawyers in the practice area are called competition lawyers, which more accurately paints the picture of what they do. Everything they tackle involves competition in one form or another. The stated goal in the legal universe is to promote and protect competition. Of course, there is wide disagreement across jurisdictions, government agencies, courts, academics, economists and lawyers about the best means to reach those laudable goals. That struggle still continues a hundred years after the birth of the antitrust laws. In China, which just enacted its first antitrust law, the same debate has only just begun.