Notes on the legal hiring market, drawn from our active searches.
ITG's 2026 first-party data on what mid-size and regional firms pay associates, broken out by practice area and years of experience. Ranges show the middle half of the market, and typical is the median.
Real estate, consumer goods, and energy drove 80 percent of last year's Chapter 11 docket. The mid-market restructuring desk turned into one of the few groups hiring at every level.
The SEC posted its lowest enforcement count in twenty years and shed 15 percent of its staff. Firms that read the last cycle as the new normal are now recruiting in the opposite direction.
Two bills, one chamber each, dead in conference. The next real shot at reform is 2027, and the firms staffing the next big trial cannot wait that long.
A record share of associates now leave within five years. The work that makes them attractive to in-house teams is reaching a narrow group sooner, and that is reshaping how legal departments should hire.
When a candidate's bio says Partner, the odds are now better than even that it does not mean equity. For a partner search, that changes the first question we ask.
More than 130 Fortune 500 companies have a general counsel who is 60 or older. The succession gap is reshaping in-house hiring from the top down.
Milbank reset the associate scale on June 2 with the biggest raises at the top. For firms, the signal is about retention, not recruiting.
Auto-glass lawsuits fell from 24,720 in a quarter to 2,613 a year later. Commercial casualty hiring never slowed. One reform, two completely different practices.
The pay gap is real and it is built into the model. The firms that recruit well do not argue with it. They sell what the number leaves out.
Susman Godfrey is paying $180,000 for a single federal clerkship. Firms that aren't in that conversation are losing laterals before the first call.
Partner lateral volume hit a four-year high. Most of the coverage credits compensation. In our searches, the driver is the merger wave and tighter diligence on portable books.
Baker McKenzie cut 600–1,000 business services roles. Beneath the headline: the highest U.S. legal employment in a decade and a new six-figure AI hiring category.
Susman Godfrey is paying $180,000 for a single federal clerkship. Quinn Emanuel is at $175,000. Cravath sits at $125,000–$150,000. The base scale moved in July 2026 and 1st-year associates now sit at $235,000, but the effective first-year package for a top litigation lateral coming out of a federal clerkship now exceeds $600,000 total. Firms that aren't competing at that level are losing the conversation before it starts. At least 15 Am Law 100 firms are also now offering $25,000–$50,000 signing bonuses to 1Ls accepted into summer programs.
3,009 partner laterals completed in 2025, the highest since 2021, up 10% year-over-year. The merger wave is what's driving it right now. Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader launched July 1, 2026 as a 3,100-lawyer firm. McDermott and Schulte Roth took effect August 1, 2026. Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing UK have approved a transatlantic combination. Partners in overlapping practice groups are reconsidering, and the firms absorbing them are hiring fast. We're now seeing firms discount stated portable-book figures by 30% upfront. Due diligence on portability is harder than it's ever been, and only 70% of a stated book typically transfers in practice.
Baker McKenzie cut 600–1,000 business services staff citing AI. The full picture is more complicated. Total U.S. legal services employment hit 1.24 million in January 2026, the highest in a decade. Seventy-two percent of legal leaders plan to increase permanent headcount in the first half of 2026. What's shifting: support roles in knowledge management, legal admin, and junior research are contracting. Meanwhile, lateral hires with AI specialization grew 106% at Am Law 200 firms in 2025. AI Legal Counsel positions are commanding $150,000–$300,000+ for permanent roles. The displacement in business services roles is real, even as overall legal headcount climbs.
83% of BigLaw associates leave within five years, a record, up from 80% in 2024. The correlation between pay and retention is statistically weak (R² of 0.23). What moves it: feedback frequency, transparency on partnership odds, and how matters are staffed. Associates report burnout 42% of the time on average; for mid- and senior-level associates, that figure is 51%. The cost of replacing a 3rd-year associate now exceeds $1 million in lost productivity, recruiting, and onboarding.
AI governance is now a core general counsel responsibility. Courts are holding counsel responsible for AI output regardless of which department selected the tool. GCs who delegated AI decisions to IT in 2024 are now retroactively building governance programs from scratch: classifying AI systems by risk level, establishing pre-deployment review, and setting monitoring protocols. State AI laws take effect across 2026 and 2027, and Colorado's deployer obligations arrive in January 2027. New compliance obligations are landing even without a federal AI Act. The hiring consequence: in-house candidates with AI compliance experience from either regulatory practice or legal operations are the most competed-for we've seen since GDPR in 2018.
Florida has added more resident attorneys than any other state this decade, with 17% growth, per ABA data. Tampa Bay's legal market reflects this: litigation and real estate remain the volume engines, but healthcare compliance, tech, and AI regulatory work are the growth categories. Glassdoor listed 788+ open legal positions in Tampa in March 2026. The tension we see most often: associates trained at Am Law firms who've relocated to Tampa are choosing between regional firm work and remote in-house roles that carry national compensation. At one to two years, regional work runs roughly $100,000–$150,000 depending on practice, and $115,000–$140,000 in insurance defense. Every firm in this market is now bidding against that remote in-house pipeline.
If you have a specific hiring question you'd like our take on, send it. The topics on this page started as client conversations.
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