Guide · For companies

What a company pays for a retained in-house search.

The candidate never pays. The fee is fixed at engagement, not re-cut when the offer moves. Guarantee and off-limits are in the same letter.

Brief a search For companies

Lorenzo Sartori — Founder, Sartori & Partners Published September 10, 2026 — What a company pays for a retained in-house search: fee, instalments, guarantee and off-limits

The company pays. Retained GC, CLO and CCO searches are a fixed fee of 28 to 33 percent of first-year cash, agreed in writing, paid in three instalments. Replacement is 12 months on those seats and 6 months on other in-house searches. Off-limits on the client's legal department runs 24 months.

01 Start here

Who pays.

The company. Never the lawyer. A search that bills the candidate is not a retained corporate search.

The company pays. Retained GC, CLO and CCO searches are a fixed fee of 28 to 33 percent of first-year cash, agreed in writing at engagement, paid in three instalments: engagement, shortlist, start. Specialist counsel is retained or exclusive contingency. Interim and fractional are day-rate only. The lawyer is not billed, not asked for a registration fee, and not asked to share a percentage of the package. That is the commercial premise. Everything else on this page is a detail of that premise.

The fees explained guide is the page a CFO should keep next to the letter. The research programme is where city cohorts and interview counts live; it is not a fee schedule. Associate-scale decoder pages on this site are written for law firms. They are not this page. Do not price a general counsel on a senior-associate cash number.

Who pays: The company. The candidate never pays.
GC / CLO / CCO: Retained only. 28 to 33 percent of first-year cash, fixed at engagement, three instalments, 12-month replacement
Senior counsel / legal ops: Retained or exclusive. Exclusive 22 to 28 percent, 6-month replacement
Specialist contingency: 20 to 25 percent, payable on start
Abort: Engagement instalment retained; shortlist and start instalments are not due
Off-limits: 24 months on the client's legal department; placed lawyers are not approached for as long as they stay

Updated September 2026. Seat, engagement model, replacement window and median weeks brief to accepted offer.
Seat	Model	Guarantee	Weeks to offer
GC / CLO	Retained, 28-33%, fixed	12 months	11 (range 8-16)
CCO	Retained, 28-33%, fixed	12 months	10
Head of Legal	Retained, fixed at engagement	6 months	10
Deputy GC	Retained or exclusive	6 months	10
Senior counsel	Retained or exclusive 22-28%	6 months	8
Legal operations	Exclusive 22-28%	6 months	9
Specialist (contingency)	20-25% on start	None	8
Interim / fractional	Day-rate only	Days credited if converted	7 days to start

Weeks are medians from the corporate clock (38 GC/CLO, 41 CCO, 47 deputy, 96 counsel, 12 legal ops, 60+ interim). Percentages are of first-year cash, fixed at engagement. Pure contingency has no replacement window.

Source: Sartori & Partners engagement model and 2017-2026 clocks.

28-33%: retained GC, CLO, CCOof first-year cash, fixed at engagement; Sartori & Partners engagement model
3: instalmentsengagement, shortlist, start; Sartori & Partners engagement model
12 / 6 mo: replacement12 months officer seats; 6 months other in-house; Sartori & Partners engagement model

02 Officer seats

GC, CLO and CCO: fixed fee, three instalments.

These four words in a letter — retained, fixed, twelve months, off-limits — are the difference between a search and a CV broker.

GC, CLO, CCO and Head-of-Legal searches are retained only. The fee is a percentage of first-year cash, inside 28 to 33 percent, converted to a dollar figure in the letter and then frozen. First-year cash means base plus target bonus as written in the offer; it does not mean equity, and it does not mean a large-cap total-compensation median. The ACC and Empsight 2025 survey puts median total cash for the group GC and CLO grouping at $410,000 on a median base of $330,000, with median total target direct compensation at $503,000. That is a survey band for a US in-house population. It is the right kind of number to sanity-check a cash envelope. It is not a bid.

A board that wants a "success fee only" on a sitting-GC succession is asking us to post the seat and hope. We will not. The succession search and the in-house counsel recruiting line run on this letter or they do not run. The method those fees buy is the GC search guide.

03 Other in-house seats

Specialist counsel: retained or exclusive contingency.

A privacy counsel is not a CLO. The letter can be lighter. It is still exclusive, and it still has a replacement window.

Senior counsel, legal operations, privacy, AI-governance, commercial: retained when the field is thin or the brief is confidential; exclusive contingency when the company will not run a parallel firm and will pay 20 to 25 percent on start. Exclusive senior counsel and exclusive legal-ops sit at 22 to 28 percent with a 6-month replacement. Legal ops closes in 9 weeks, of 12 placements. Senior counsel in 8 weeks, of 96. Those clocks are in the how a general counsel search runs.

Contingency that is not exclusive is how a company receives the same three names from three desks. We will not run that on a confidential in-house brief. If the company wants a non-exclusive specialist search, it is not this desk.

04 Triggers

Instalment triggers.

Engagement is the letter. Shortlist is the assessed slate. Start is the first day in post. None of the three is 'when we feel good about it.'

Engagement is due when the letter is signed: the Mandate Blueprint, the cash envelope, the guarantee, the off-limits. That instalment is the abort number. If the company stops after the Blueprint, it is retained, because mapping time has been reserved and, usually, begun.

Shortlist is due when the assessed dossiers go to the client — four names on a GC file, each with deals run, regulators faced, teams built, board fluency. A client who asks for "a few more CVs" has received a shortlist. The instalment is not a quality opinion.

Start is due on the first day in post, after notice. If the chosen candidate declines, we continue under the same letter; completion on retained corporate mandates is 92 percent since 2017, and offer acceptance is 96 percent. A declined offer does not reset the fee. It uses the slate already paid for.

05 Replacement

Twelve months versus six.

The window follows the seat, not the brand. Officer searches carry the longer window because the cost of a miss is a board problem.

Twelve months from start on retained GC, CLO and CCO. Six months on other in-house searches. If the placed lawyer leaves the role inside the window, we rerun without a second fee. Retention of placed in-house leaders on this programme is 97 percent at 12 months and 91 percent at 24 months, of the 230+ placements. The guarantee is the backstop for the other cases, not a marketing claim about a named file.

Promotion-out is excluded. A Head of Legal who is made GC in month five has not failed. A PE hold-period exit that sells the company and retires the seat has not failed. Misconduct that the company elects to treat as a departure is a facts discussion in the letter, not a slogan. The methodology records the same terms so a later page cannot quietly rewrite them.

06 The other half of the letter

Off-limits.

We never approach lawyers we placed, for as long as they stay. We never recruit from a client's legal department for 24 months after a mandate.

Off-limits is the reason a general counsel will take the call. A firm that places a deputy in March and calls the rest of the team in June is not a firm that GC will introduce to a board. The 24-month window runs on the client's legal department after the mandate, whether the mandate closed or aborted after engagement. Placed lawyers are off-limits for as long as they stay, not for 24 months. Those are two different rules and both are in the letter.

Conflicts are checked before outreach. An NDA is available on request. No CV leaves us without written candidate consent. Blind both ways until mutual interest is confirmed. None of that is extra. It is what the fee is for. A company briefing that wants names before terms is not a briefing we will run.

Fee, replacement window and off-limits were in the letter before they called anyone. That is the only way I will sign a search firm. The hire accepted on the first offer.

CFO London-headquartered private-credit manager

07 Against what

What the fee buys.

Not a stack of CVs. A mapped sitting field, a confidential process, assessed dossiers, offer engineering, and a replacement window.

The fee buys the method in the how to run a general counsel search guide: total-market mapping rather than a posting, private outreach, a shortlist the board can sit with, and 90-day check-ins. It buys the 21-day average shortlist across the corporate line and the 24-day GC shortlist, of 38 files. It does not buy a guarantee that the first name will accept; it buys a process whose offers have accepted 96 percent of the time and whose retained corporate mandates have completed 92 percent of the time, since 2017, across 23 countries and 41 cities.

It does not buy a right to recruit the team afterwards. That is the off-limits, working in the other direction.

08 Arithmetic

Worked GC example.

Growth-stage first-year cash of $320,000. Thirty percent. Three instalments. Twelve-month replacement. Not an associate scale. Not a large-cap total.

Take first-year cash of $320,000: base plus target bonus, inside the growth-stage / Series B to C bands we actually price (first GC base $240,000 to $340,000 with a 20 to 40 percent bonus; growth-stage / pre-IPO GC base $300,000 to $420,000 with a 30 to 60 percent bonus). Those bands are on the GC salary page. They are cash. They are not equity.

At 30 percent, inside the 28 to 33 percent retained band, the fee is $96,000, fixed when the letter is signed. Three equal instalments of $32,000: engagement, shortlist, start. If the company aborts after the Blueprint, $32,000 is retained. Replacement window: 12 months. Off-limits: 24 months on the legal department. If an interim ran first, days billed are credited against the $96,000; they are not added on top.

Do not substitute the ACC/Empsight group-seat median total cash of $410,000, or the $503,000 median total target direct compensation, into this example and call it the same search. Those figures describe a different, mostly larger, US in-house population as of 1 March 2025. Do not substitute a large-cap total-compensation median either. Large-cap listed GC base in our bands is $650,000 to $1.1 million; total compensation at the largest US issuers is a different series and a different universe. Never blend a total package into a cash fee. Mid-cap listed GC cash is $450,000 to $650,000 base with a 60 to 100 percent bonus: the same 28 to 33 percent applies to whatever cash envelope the letter actually names.

London first GC cash in our bands is £140,000 to £220,000. DIFC GC is $220,000 to $380,000. The percentage band does not change with the city. The cash envelope does. Write the envelope. Freeze the fee. Then call people. To put that letter in front of us: brief a search.

09 Questions

Questions a CFO asks before signing.

Why is the fee not a percentage that moves with first-year cash?

It is a percentage of first-year cash, fixed at engagement, so a last-week salary bump does not rewrite the letter. On retained GC, CLO and CCO work the band is 28 to 33 percent, agreed in writing in week 1, paid in three instalments. The candidate never pays. A moving target is how a CFO ends up signing a second number they did not budget.

What does the replacement guarantee cover?

Departure from the role, not promotion out of it. Twelve months from start on retained GC, CLO and CCO searches; 6 months on other in-house searches. If the placed lawyer leaves inside the window, we rerun without a second fee. A sponsor exit that retires the seat, a carve-out the board designed, or a promotion into a larger group role are not replacement events.

If we promote the placed lawyer, does the guarantee still apply?

No: promotion-out is not a departure from the role. The guarantee is a replacement of the seat, not a tax on the company's success. A deputy hired on a 6-month window who is made Head of Legal in month four has not triggered a rerun. The off-limits on the legal department still holds for 24 months.

What happens if we abort the search after the Blueprint?

The engagement instalment is retained. Mapping and outreach have started or have been reserved. The shortlist and start instalments are not due. That is the abort rule, in the letter, before anyone is called. It is not a success fee dressed as a retainer.

Do we pay a placement percentage on an interim or fractional GC?

No: interim and fractional are day-rate only. Days billed are credited against a later retained fee if the company converts to a permanent search. There is no 28 percent of a notional salary on a 90-day cover.

Who never pays the fee?

The lawyer never pays. Corporate search on this desk is a company cost. Candidates are not billed, not asked for a registration fee, and not asked to share a percentage of their first package. That is the whole of the rule. The working with a legal recruiter page is the process view; this page is the commercial one.

10 What this guide draws on

Sources.

The percentages, instalments, guarantee and off-limits are the engagement model. Survey cash is ACC and Empsight. City cohorts live on /research/.

Sources

5 references

Sartori & Partners research programme ↗
Legal recruitment fees explained ↗
General counsel salary 2026 ↗
ACC / Empsight — 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, Executive Summary acc.com ↗
2026 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey — Key Findings acc.com ↗

Fee percentages are Sartori engagement terms, not a survey of other firms. ACC/Empsight 2025 is effective 1 March 2025. Associate-scale figures published elsewhere on this site are for law-firm hiring and are not used here.

11 Keep reading

Method, process, and when the answer is not a retained search.

Also: hiring in-house counsel for PE-backed companies (hold-period economics change the letter), for companies, methodology.

For CFOs and chief executives

The letter is the search.

Fixed fee, three instalments, replacement window and off-limits, in writing, before anyone is called. That is the only way this desk runs a GC, CLO or CCO mandate.