Counsel Promotion Calendar 2026: Midyear Belongs to Counsel

Partners who ask when do law firms promote counsel usually hear the same answer: with the partners, in January. Sartori & Partners data show a second calendar running beside the first. In July 2025 firms named 204 counsel and 135 partners, more new counsel than new partners in the same month. Three months later, in October 2025, they named 25 counsel against 172 partners. The counsel title is granted on dates of its own, and a firm hiring at counsel level should plan around those dates rather than around the partner rounds.

The midyear round is where the counsel title stands apart. July 2025 brought 204 counsel promotions against 135 partner promotions, or 1.5 new counsel for every new partner. July 2024 gave almost the same reading: 202 counsel against 135 partners. Two Julys in a row, the counsel class was the larger one, so this is a fixed point in firm calendars and not a one-month spike.

June opens the season. In June 2025 firms named 70 counsel and only 37 partners, a counsel class 1.9 times the size of the partner class that month. Taken together, June and July 2025 produced 274 counsel promotions and 172 partner promotions. The counsel title carries no equity vote, so a firm can grant it at a midyear review without waiting for the partnership meeting that settles the January class. For a firm recruiting counsel, the weeks after the July announcements are when senior associates elsewhere know whether they made the title this year.

October turns the July picture upside down. October 2025 brought 25 counsel promotions and 172 partner promotions, which works out to 6.9 new partners for each new counsel. The partner side of October is a real round, with more partners named than in July. The counsel side barely registers: it is the smallest counsel count of any month set out in this report.

The practical reading is simple. A firm that waits for the autumn to see which senior associates were passed over for counsel will find little new information, because the counsel decisions were made in the summer or will be made in the winter. October news is partner news, and the candidates it frees up are senior counsel and associates who expected a partner title, not those waiting on counsel.

The January round is the biggest of the year for both titles, and that is where the two calendars meet. January 2026 named 667 counsel, but alongside 1,666 partners: 2.5 partners for each counsel. That single month carried 60.0% of the counsel promotions recorded from January to May 2026. May 2026 followed the same shape on a smaller scale, with 203 counsel against 362 partners.

So the counsel title has two seasons. In January it is a side announcement to the partner class; in June and July it is the headline. A firm that benchmarks its own counsel class against peers by reading January alone misses the round in which counsel outnumber partners, and a firm that times its outreach to the January lists alone reaches counsel candidates months after their outcome was settled.

Lateral hiring at counsel level does not follow the promotion calendar. In the Sartori & Partners lateral database, firms hired 120 counsel laterally in July 2025, a month when 204 counsel were promoted, and 142 in October 2025, when only 25 were. January 2026 was the busiest of these months on both measures, with 216 lateral counsel moves against 667 promotions. June 2025 brought 118 lateral counsel moves and May 2026 brought 163.

Counsel took 12.1% of all lateral moves in July 2025 and 12.5% in October 2025, a steady share across two months whose promotion counts could hardly differ more. The lateral counsel market is open all year. What changes from month to month is the supply of lawyers who have just learned their internal outcome, and that supply peaks after the January and midyear rounds, not after October.

Annual counts flatten this calendar. Firms named 1,574 counsel in 2025, and July alone carried 13.0% of them, while October carried 1.6%. On the partner side the weights run the other way: July held 4.7% of the 2,859 partner promotions of 2025, and October held 6.0%. The same two months that look alike in a partner calendar look nothing alike in a counsel calendar.

Sartori & Partners records counsel promotions for the market as a whole, from public law-firm announcements, firm websites and professional profiles, checked monthly. They are not split by practice or city, so the calendar above is a market calendar: an individual firm may run its counsel round at another point in the year, and the first question in any counsel search is when the target firm names its own class.

Plan counsel-level lateral searches around the midyear round. In June and July 2025 firms named 274 counsel between them, which means the weeks after those announcements hold the largest group of senior associates who know they were passed over and are open to a title elsewhere. Outreach that lands before the round competes with a promotion the candidate still hopes for; outreach that lands after it competes with nothing.

Settle your own counsel class before closing outside counsel hires. If your firm names counsel in the summer, a lateral counsel offer made in the weeks before that round sends a message to the internal candidates who are waiting. Do not expect October to free up counsel candidates: with 25 counsel promotions that month, the October round is about partners. And treat a counsel hire as a bet on a later partner decision: over the last 5 years the median partner was promoted 10.0 years after the first year of practice, a figure based on 10,427 partners promoted in that period. The partner round the lawyer will be assessed in matters more than the month the lawyer arrives.