IP Lateral Hiring in 2026: Lawyers Move as Teams and Stay in Town

Intellectual property lateral hiring follows its own rules: the lawyers arrive in groups, and they arrive from across the street rather than from another city. Sartori & Partners data show that 5.1% of IP lateral moves in the 12 months to October 2026 were part of a team joining the same firm in the same quarter, against 1.5% of moves across all practices. Only 15.9% of IP laterals changed city, against 20.5% market-wide. A third pattern sits beside these two: IP lawyers also leave law firms for in-house roles more often than most of their peers. For a firm planning to add patent or trademark capacity, the unit of hire is often a group, the pool is local, and the competition includes companies as well as other firms.

Across the whole market, a lateral move is almost always a solo decision. Team moves made up 1.5% of all lateral moves in the 12 months to October 2026. In IP the figure was 5.1%, 3.4 times the market rate. Litigation, the practice that overlaps with 54.3% of IP moves, sits at 2.0%. Technology, data and privacy, which shares many of the same clients and much of the same patent and licensing work, is the closest match at 5.4%.

The reason is structural. Patent prosecution and patent litigation run on mixed teams: a partner, technical specialists, associates with science or engineering degrees, and often patent agents. A docket of applications and a run of district court cases cannot be split cleanly between people, so when the partner moves, the people who run the work tend to follow. Clients with large portfolios also expect continuity on deadlines that do not wait for a transition.

For a hiring firm, a team move changes the size of the decision. Conflict checks cover more matters, the business case rests on a shared book rather than one partner's, and integration costs land in the first year. Firms that recruit IP partners should plan the offer for the group from the first meeting, and should ask early which associates and specialists expect to come along. A firm that prices only the partner will be surprised by the team that comes with the yes.

In the Sartori & Partners lateral database, 15.9% of IP laterals also changed city, 4.6 points below the 20.5% rate for all practices. Litigation sits at 19.6% and technology, data and privacy at 18.4%, both closer to the market. IP lawyers build their practice around a court, a patent office relationship, a technology cluster and a local client base, and those do not travel well.

The city map of where IP lawyers left and where they joined shows the same stability. New York took 13.7% of IP arrivals and supplied 12.3% of IP departures. San Francisco took 9.4% of arrivals and supplied 8.6% of departures. Each large IP market mostly recycles its own lawyers.

This matters most for a firm opening or building an IP office. Relocation offers rarely carry an IP partner to a new market. The practical route is to hire a local team that already holds the clients and the court relationships in that city, and to accept that the search will be measured in quarters, not weeks.

IP hiring concentrates in the cities where technology, life sciences and the patent bar sit. On the Sartori & Partners city index, where one hundred means the same share as in the whole market, San Francisco reads 292, Boston 235 and Washington 187. Dallas follows at 172. New York is still the largest single city for IP arrivals, but at an index of 93 it takes slightly less than its market share, and London reads only 56.

The neighbor practice is less tilted toward the Bay Area. Technology, data and privacy hiring indexes at 174 in San Francisco and 132 in London, so it follows the global data and privacy work more than the patent clusters do. For a firm hiring IP talent, the pools that matter are San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Dallas. Combined with the low rate of city change, a firm without an office in one of those cities will struggle to reach the candidates there.

Partners made up 34.4% of IP lateral moves in the 12 months to October 2026, against 27.7% across all practices and 27.4% in litigation. Associates made up 49.7% of IP moves against 58.5% of the market. Team moves are part of the reason: a partner who brings a group arrives with associates, but the decision to move starts at the top.

Volume has not grown the way the wider market has. In the settled 12-month window to September 2026, IP lateral moves went from 987 to 1,058: the count held flat (+7.2%), inside the noise of the two totals. IP partner moves went from 326 to 352; that count held flat (+8.0%) as well. Across all practices, lateral moves rose 9.0% over the same window.

A steady pool weighted toward partners means a firm hiring an IP partner competes for the same limited set of names each year. Expect several bidders per candidate, and expect the candidate to ask what the offer means for the team behind them.

Sartori & Partners have tracked moves out of private practice in full since May 2026. Over those six months, 123 IP lawyers moved from a law firm to an in-house role, 24.3 for every hundred IP lateral moves between firms. Across the whole market, in-house moves equaled 13.1% of lateral moves. Per lateral move, IP sends far more lawyers to companies than the market does.

Litigation, by contrast, loses 12.3 lawyers to in-house roles for every hundred laterals. Technology, data and privacy goes further than IP at 30.3: companies that own large patent and data portfolios hire from the same benches. Among the large practices that Sartori & Partners track in this series, from litigation and corporate to tax and private equity, IP shows the highest in-house rate; corporate and M&A comes next at 20.1.

For a firm, this is a retention problem as much as a hiring one. The IP associate or counsel a firm trains is a natural hire for a company's patent or brand team, and that move is usually permanent. Firms should treat in-house teams as a direct rival in IP, keep partner track and technical work visible to senior associates, and stay close to former lawyers who move in-house, since they often become the clients who send work back.

Plan IP growth around teams, not individuals. With 5.1% of IP moves made as groups, a firm should budget, check conflicts and plan integration for a team from the first conversation. The partner is the entry point; the associates, agents and technical specialists are what keep the clients.

Recruit where the lawyers already are. Only 15.9% of IP laterals changed city, so an office in San Francisco, Boston, Washington or Dallas reaches candidates that a relocation offer will not. A firm entering one of those markets should do it by hiring a local group.

Watch the exit to in-house. At 24.3 in-house moves per hundred laterals, the risk to an IP bench comes from companies as much as from rival firms. The firms below hired the most IP partners in the past year.