Michael Murray is a litigation partner in the Antitrust and Competition, Appellate, Regulatory, and Complex Litigation practices of Paul Hastings and is based in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office. Mr. Murray brings significant government antitrust and competition experience, having most recently served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), where he oversaw the work of approximately 350 lawyers and 50 economists. Mr. Murray also brings significant government experience to a practice consisting of preparing and litigating challenges to agency rulemaking, adjudication, or other activity, having served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General at DOJ, where he oversaw the Civil Division’s defense of high-profile rulemaking challenges and other agency actions.

While at the Antitrust Division, Mr. Murray supervised numerous significant civil antitrust matters—including merger and conduct investigations, litigation, settlements, and appeals—and criminal prosecutions, including investigations, trials, and appeals. He led teams that brought novel and traditional merger challenges, launched significant monopolization cases, litigated the first-ever live-witness Tunney Act hearing, negotiated complex merger divestitures, settled the largest consent decree enforcement in decades, and investigated complex conduct matters through the Civil Conduct Task Force and the new Financial Services, Fintech, and Banking Section. Mr. Murray personally argued the largest vertical merger appeal and the most significant monopolization appeal in recent decades and filed over fifty Supreme Court, appellate court, and district court briefs on unilateral and joint conduct, class actions, labor, exemptions and immunities, criminal law, and intellectual property. He also oversaw all criminal matters, from preliminary investigation to Supreme Court, including cases involving financial and labor markets (e.g., the first-ever wage-fixing case and no-poach matters), compliance programs, and ACPERA. Mr. Murray had direct involvement in matters across a range of industries, including fintech, financial services, banking, media, entertainment, digital platforms, telecommunications, health care, consumer products, transportation, and agriculture. He also led case coordination and policy development with international competition agencies, as well as state enforcers.  Finally, he supervised litigation involving dozens of regulatory challenges to agency rulemaking or other administrative action for agencies including the FCC, DOT, STB, and FERC.

Mr. Murray joined the Antitrust Division from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, where he served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General. In that office, he had oversight responsibility for the Antitrust Division, the Civil Division, and criminal law policy initiatives. Mr. Murray served on the Deputy Attorney General’s Corporate Enforcement and Accountability Working Group, which issued policies on ability to pay determinations and piling on, the Associate Attorney General’s Regulatory Reform Task Force, which issued policies on the use of guidance documents, and the Civil Division’s Affirmative Civil Litigation Group, which issued policies on the False Claims Act. During his tenure, he oversaw the Civil Division’s defense of high-profile rulemaking challenges, administrative adjudications, and other agency actions from nearly every cabinet department.

Mr. Murray previously was in private practice, where he litigated a variety of antitrust, commercial, and regulatory disputes at the appellate and trial levels, and served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he supervised, briefed, argued appeals, and prosecuted cases in district court. He clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain and on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. 

• The National Law Journal, Rising Star (2023)
• The Legal 500 USA, Civil Litigation/Class Actions: Defense (2022)
• The Legal 500 USA, Merger Control (2022)
• Mitigating Labor Antitrust Risks as Enforcement Ramps Up, Law360 (June 16, 2022)
• Life Sciences and IP: Navigating the Current Antitrust Environment (December 1, 2021)
• How To Mitigate Antitrust Risk In ESG Efforts, Law360 (October 19, 2021)
• Antitrust Enforcement in Labor Markets, 59 SANTA CLARA L. REV. 561 (2020)
• Private Management of Public Spaces, 34 HARV. ENVTL. L. REV. 179 (2010)
• Note, The Law of Describing Accidents, 118 YALE L.J. 1484 (2009)

• Yale University, J.D., 2009
• Princeton University, A.B. (summa cum laude), 2006