Future-Proof Your Career: FTC’s Leading Attorneys Coming to Carolina Law
January 14, 2025
Two of the Federal Trade Commission’s most prominent attorneys, Nathan Brenner and Rohan Pai, will bring their expertise to UNC School of Law in Spring 2026. They recently joined us in Chapel Hill for lunch giving students a preview of their groundbreaking course in antitrust litigation.
“This is some of the most exciting and important work going on in the country right now,” Dean Martin H. Brinkley ’92 told students, drawing from his experience as the sole antitrust lawyer at his prior firm. “People who know about areas like this are enormously valuable to law firms because other people don’t, and they’re scared by it,” Brinkley explained.

Brenner, now the FTC’s Deputy Chief Trial Counsel, spearheads the Meta-Facebook monopolization case while fresh off leading the FTC’s 2023 challenge to Amgen’s $27.8 billion Horizon Therapeutics acquisition. His path to the FTC included four years at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and clerkships with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Brenner’s cases have reshaped American business from the historic AT&T-Time Warner case to significant health insurance consolidations.

As Deputy Assistant Director of the Mergers IV Division, Pai has become a driving force in the FTC’s Bureau of Competition since arriving from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 2015. He recently helped chart the course of antitrust enforcement as part of the FTC’s 2023 Merger Guidelines drafting team while leading challenges to mergers across healthcare and hospital systems.
Their work spans tech giants to healthcare systems to fast-food chains, demanding new expertise daily. “Every day, we are trying to become subject matter experts in something new,” Brenner told students—a constant variety that, combined with civil litigation’s breakneck pace, creates an unmatched intellectual challenge.
The Spring 2026 course places students at the heart of this dynamic field, featuring guest lectures from former FTC commissioners, Department of Justice section chiefs, and top private practitioners. Students will tackle actual case materials through in-depth simulations, preparing them for high-stakes practice from day one.
Antitrust opens doors across the legal spectrum: government enforcement, elite firms, in-house counsel, and state attorneys general offices. “You can flip between different kinds of lawyering,” Pai explained, “and practice anywhere from DC to Charlotte,” whether specializing in merger reviews, criminal investigations, civil litigation, or transactional work.
For Carolina Law students eyeing careers in elite firms, federal enforcement, or corporate counsel roles, this course offers unprecedented access to attorneys defining antitrust law for decades.