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I'm a current district court law clerk, interested in antitrust, and trying to begin thinking about which firms I should apply to / should prefer. I would prefer DC but also good with NYC.

I care about feeling like I'm engaging my brain on the economically cutting-edge / intellectually interesting aspect of antitrust work, but I don't have any direction at all about whether I should want to be involved in cartels / merger review / class action lit, or what.

I know Chambers has rankings of DC antiturst firms, but I'm not sure how these bands relate to anything that impacts my life if I show up as a new associate. https://www.chambersandpartners.com/122 ... -antitrust

I believe White & Case DC does antitrust work

I work in merger clearance, and can tell you the firms I run into the most from that Chambers and Partners list in DC are Jones Day, Arnold & Porter, Dechert, Skadden, Weil, Latham, White & Case, and Crowell & Moring. If I had to name a firm, I'd say Arnold & Porter is probably the fanciest name, simply because they employ both Bill Baer and Debbie Feinstein, which gives them a leg-up on anyone else in terms of business generation.

For merger reviews, a decent way to figure this stuff out is to look at the largest/highest profile deals of the last few years and see who has done the antitrust work for them. (e.g., off the top of my head AT&T/Time Warner, CVS/Aetna, Aetna/Humana, Cigna/Anthem, AT&T/DirecTV, GE/Electrolux, Walgreens/Rite Aid, Staples/Office Depot, Office Depot/Office Max, Halliburton/Baker Hughes, System/US Foods, etc....).

One other aspect to consider is the degree to which these firms work on deals their own M&A shops generate (e.g., Latham, White & Case, Skadden) vs. "a la carte" firms, which do work where the M&A was done elsewhere (e.g., Arnold & Porter, Dechert, Crowell & Moring). A higher percentage of your work at "a la carte" firms is going to be high-profile work, but the downside is there is less of a steady engine creating work, so from talking to associates at those firms, there is more stress about hours when things get slow.

I don't know anything about the cartel litigation firms (the work is pretty strongly bifurcated between litigation and merger review).