The five-year number
A record 83 percent of departing associates now leave within five years of being hired, on new NALP Foundation data reported this spring. The same data showed something the prior trend had not: in 2025, lateral hires across the surveyed firms outnumbered entry-level hires, 3,296 to 3,039. Firms are buying experience instead of growing it.
The junior associate has become, in effect, a short-term asset, and everyone in the system now acts like it. The associate plans the exit early. The firm backfills laterally. The in-house team is, more often than not, the destination both sides quietly assume.
A deal market that rewards a narrow group
The recovery is real but it is lopsided. Mergers and acquisitions in early 2026 ran to roughly $1.2 trillion across about 11,400 transactions, a 27 percent jump in value on a 15 percent drop in count, the thinnest first quarter for deal volume in over a decade. Deals above $10 billion hit record levels. Fewer, larger transactions concentrate the work.
The associates getting the most transferable experience, the kind in-house teams actually want, are the ones staffed on megadeals at a short list of firms. That concentration is part of why the in-house move is happening sooner. The marketable experience is arriving earlier for the people who get it, and later or never for everyone else.
Why in-house pulls earlier now
In-house teams have adjusted. They hire earlier than they used to and offer a clearer path up, which makes the jump realistic before the mid-level mark rather than after it. Pay has kept the move credible. General counsel base ranges for 2026 run from about $222,750 to $270,500 by Robert Half's guidance, senior corporate counsel total pay sits around $272,000 at the median, and public-company general counsel reach into the millions at the top. Robert Half also expects demand for in-house leaders with real AI-governance and data-privacy depth to grow around 8 percent.
On the in-house side we are now running searches at class years that would have been a year or two more senior not long ago. Companies that once waited for a seasoned fifth or sixth year increasingly open the search at the third or fourth, because that is where the available talent now sits.
What this changes for the teams doing the hiring
If the experienced associate is leaving at year three or four instead of five or six, the in-house employer waiting for a seasoned fifth-year is fishing in a pond that drained early. The teams hiring well in 2026 moved their target down a class or two and accepted that they are finishing the training rather than buying it done.
The structural change we tell legal departments to make is exactly that: scope the search one or two class years lower than instinct says, and budget for finishing the training rather than buying it finished. The alternative is a search that stays open while the right candidates take other offers.
What we tell associates who want out
Earlier is available. Earlier is not automatically better. An associate who leaves at year three with one deal of real substance is in a different position than one who leaves at the same point having only touched the edges of ten. In-house teams that hire earlier are also screening harder for the depth a shorter run does not guarantee.
Our honest advice to an associate targeting an early move is to make sure the one or two matters on the resume are deep, not decorative. Earlier works when the experience is real. It backfires when the candidate mistook exposure for ownership, and that gap tends to surface in the interview.