Who still chooses the firms when an AI score ranks the panel.

We have worked the New York in-house market for more than 10 years, for companies whose legal departments sit in banks, insurers, media groups, sponsors and corporate headquarters. Over the trailing three years we closed 24 New York in-house searches at a 94 percent completion rate, with a median 16 working days from offer to acceptance and a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months. The question those mandates actually answered was not which firm an algorithm preferred. It was which human being inside the company was allowed to appoint the lawyer.

Sartori & Partners runs a continuous research program over nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles mapped globally, with quarterly market surveys since 2019. City-level interview and mandate findings sit inside that program.

Public surveys describe the same split, and they describe it as decision rights, not as software. The 2025 Legal Department Operations Index, published by Thomson Reuters Institute with Buying Legal Council from a July 2025 survey of 128 U.S. departments, found 82 percent of respondents have at least one dedicated legal-operations role and 45 percent are a general counsel tasked to run legal operations. Sixty-three percent of legal-operations-background respondents in that survey use data analytics to identify cost savings, against 29 percent of general-counsel respondents. Operations runs the spend file. The general counsel still sets service and quality.

CLOC’s 2025 State of the Industry report, based on Harbor’s 2024 survey of 186 organizations, puts outside-counsel and vendor management in legal operations’ scope at 95 percent of departments. That is the labeled home of the panel file: CLOC Core 12 calls it Firm and Vendor Management. It is not the labeled home of the named-lawyer choice. The same survey ranks expertise of a particular lawyer as the criterion departments call very important. A preferred list that cannot name a lawyer is a rate card.

Corporate procurement did not take the seat. Use of corporate, non-legal procurement policies in the 2025 LDO Index fell to 6 percent from 20 percent a year earlier. The panel moved toward the legal department, not toward a company-wide sourcing desk. A legal-procurement hire is a different brief.

Of Sartori’s 24 closed New York in-house searches over three years, 9 were seats whose mandate included panel, vendor-management or e-billing ownership. Four of those 9 required a rewritten brief after the first slate because the company had specified a licensed lawyer for an operations market that, on the public evidence, often does not require a J.D. That is not a talent shortage. It is a specification error about who owns the score and who owns the hire.

Direct testimony matches the split. A chief legal officer at a New York-headquartered bank, DFS-covered and running a Class A-scale cybersecurity file, told Sartori over that same 24-month window that legal operations could rank the firms on rate and on AI disclosure; she still had to tell the board which lawyer would appear in the Southern District of New York. A head of legal operations at a publicly traded media company, New York headquarters, described the Director, Legal Operations seat as e-billing, rate reviews and ALSP onboarding — and was explicit that the executive vice president and chief legal officer still named the relationship lawyer.

Across 750 structured interviews with London in-house lawyers, the same split appeared: operations ran the file, the general counsel named the lawyer. The New York overlay is thicker — Part 500, the Commercial Division, S.D.N.Y. — and it does not move the appointment off the in-house desk.

Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions’ LegalVIEW Insights Volume 2025-2, reported on 17 December 2025, put New York City at the top of the invoice set for services rendered in the first half of 2025: partners averaging $1,972 an hour, associates $1,214. Partner-rate growth at Am Law 1–25 firms slowed to a 6.3 percent mean increase in 2025 from 10.4 percent in 2024. Those are realized invoice rates, not rack rates. They are why a New York head of legal treats mix as the first lever and a score as a later one.

The Thomson Reuters Institute Law Firm Rates Report 2026, published 20 October 2025, recorded worked rates up 7.4 percent against 2.8 percent inflation. The 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, published 7 January 2026 with Georgetown Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession from a 184-firm Financial Insights base, put 2025 worked-rate growth at 7.3 percent and stated that 90 percent of legal dollars still flow through hourly billing. The average Am Law 100 lawyer’s standard rates cracked the $1,000 barrier in 2025; everyone else averaged around $600. Clients spent less per hour on the average legal service in 2025 than in 2024 despite those rate increases, because work mixed downstream to lower-cost firms. A preferred list that cannot move volume off the most expensive names is not doing the job a score is being asked to do.

Demand hours explain why the list still needs specialists. The same 2026 legal-market report put weekday-adjusted demand as high as 4.4 percent in July 2025 and the average firm at 1.9 percent for the year. Midsize firms surged with nearly 5 percent demand growth in the latter half of 2025; the Am Law 100 could not crack 2 percent. Practice-level year-over-year demand growth included M&A at 3.3 percent and litigation at 2.5 percent. LSEG’s United States Investment Banking Review for full-year 2025, with data as of 2 January 2026, recorded any-U.S.-involvement announced M&A of $2.78 trillion, up 50.8 percent from 2024, on a deal count down 9.7 percent. Concentration in megadeals is the measured fact. The New York general counsel keeps M&A and antitrust specialists on the panel for that slice and can move smaller combinations to a lower-rate tier.

Litigation demand in this geo is not a metaphor. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts district profile for the twelve months ending 31 March 2026 recorded 12,644 civil filings in the Southern District of New York, up 8.4 percent from the prior period, with a median 5.9 months from filing to civil disposition. Under 22 NYCRR § 522.4, registered in-house counsel may not appear before a New York tribunal. An AI score on a panel list does not change that gate. Commercial Division work in New York County still goes to lawyers who know a $500,000 object-of-the-action threshold that has applied to equitable and declaratory suits since 31 March 2025.

The 2025 Legal Department Operations Index, drawing Legal Tracker analytics covering more than 1,500 corporate law departments, reported that traditional law firms still represented 86 percent of total legal spend in 2024. Fixed fees doubled since 2007 and remain 5 percent of total spend. Alternative fee arrangements are used in about 20 percent of legal matters. Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2025 State of the Corporate Law Department, published 25 March 2025 from more than 2,400 interviews with corporate general counsel, found 77 percent of legal matters still handled on a billable-hour basis and 61 percent of general counsel naming an increase in alternative fees as a medium-to-high priority. Spend is more hourly than matter count. The mix lever and the fee lever are not the same tool.