Who made partner in 2026, and where.

The 2026 Am Law 100, covering calendar-year 2025 and published by The American Lawyer on 14 April 2026, reported average profits per equity partner of $3.59 million, up 14.0 percent, on $178.95 billion of revenue. The methodology, dated the same day, defines equity partners as those receiving no more than half their compensation on a fixed-income basis and nonequity partners as those receiving more than half on a fixed-income basis. PEP is net income divided by equity partners. It is not what a newly promoted income partner earns.

Inside that same year, nonequity partner ranks at Am Law 100 firms increased by almost 7 percent; equity partner counts grew by only 2 percent. Attorney headcount rose about 4 percent, to 128,868. Citi’s 2026 Client Advisory, covering nine months of 2025, recorded equity-partner headcount down 0.5 percent and income-partner growth of 6 percent in its sample of primarily U.S.-headquartered firms. The 2026 classes sat on that geometry: more titles, a protected equity pie.

NALP’s 2025 Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms, drawn from the 2025 NALP Directory of Legal Employers, gives the multi-tier census a company actually hires from. Multi-tier firms that provided equity detail collectively listed 20,036 partners, of which 55.7 percent were equity and 44.3 percent nonequity. Equity’s share has fallen from 61.3 percent in 2011. Women were 29.55 percent of all partners and 26.5 percent of equity partners; partners of color were 12.67 percent of all partners and 10.5 percent of equity partners. A company hiring “a partner” from a U.S. large firm is, on these averages, still more likely to be hiring a man in the equity tier, and somewhat more likely to find women and lawyers of color in the nonequity tier.

The cascade into 2026 is dated. Above the Law, on 13 May 2026, places Sullivan & Cromwell’s nonequity track in a 15 January 2026 memo and Freshfields’ nonequity tier in February 2026, after Cravath (November 2023), Paul Weiss (March 2024), and a 2024–2025 sequence that includes WilmerHale, Cleary, Debevoise, Arnold & Porter and Skadden. The same piece characterizes 10 Am Law 100 firms as still maintaining a single partnership tier. That is legal-press characterization, not an ALM table, and is read here as such.

We have worked in the New York market for more than 10 years, for general counsel, chief legal officers and, on the minority book, law firms on the partner line. Typical partner-line timelines run 4 to 7 months. Of 22 closed New York partner searches over the trailing three years, 14 were companies hiring a lawyer coming off a promotion cycle into a general counsel, deputy, or head-of-legal seat; 8 were law-firm laterals.

Six of those 14 company-side files closed on the lawyer the partnership math discarded — counsel, or a passed-over associate — not the newly elected partner. Those six ran to the long end of the 4-to-7-month band. Five of the 14 had to be re-briefed after the first shortlist because our first memo listed “partner” without the equity, income or local-partner split, and the company had written the requisition for an equity partner. That is a miss in our own process, and it is why the rung now sits in the first screening call rather than the fourth.

Counter-offer incidence on this New York partner line is 39 percent. Median offer-to-acceptance is 15 working days. A newly elected nonequity partner is expensive to extract and easy to over-specify. The discarded counsel is often already psychologically in motion. A chief legal officer at a New York-headquartered listed software company told us they would not put a January 2026 nonequity partner into a deputy general counsel seat without asking the capital-contribution question — and that the discarded counsel from the same class was the better in-house hire, because they had already been running the client file without origination credit.

A head of legal at a PE-backed industrial platform in the New York metro put the lists to a different use: as a practice-label map (who is busy in M&A, private credit, funds) and as useless as a seniority map. That is the right read. In Sartori’s Q2 2026 survey wave, 41 of 68 New York general counsel and heads of legal who answered the partnership item said they had asked “did they make partner” before they asked which rung. Made partner is a screening question. It is not a hiring criterion.

The in-house desk is not a second pyramid. Lawyers held about 864,800 U.S. jobs in 2024, with 51 percent in legal services, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook. ACC, using BLS OEWS through 2024, put New York in-house counsel at about 23,200 in 2024, up from about 16,000 in 2019. The ABA Journal, on 9 December 2025, restated 1.37 million licensed U.S. lawyers in 2025, with New York at 190,015 active lawyers — a licensing census, larger than BLS jobs. CLOC’s 2026 report found only 37 percent of departments expect outside-counsel spend to increase, down from 58 percent the prior year. In the ACC/FTI 2026 survey, released 29 January 2026 (1,049 chief legal officers across 43 countries), 84 percent report directly to the CEO.

Two-way traffic exists and should not be inflated into a wave. A California-headquartered global firm announced on 13 April 2026 that a U.S. technology-and-growth PE sponsor’s in-house legal director of fund formation had joined its New York partnership; the firm said the practice is primary counsel to more than 950 investment-fund organizations, with $120 billion-plus of committed capital in closings over five years. Separately, a U.K. software-focused PE house’s general counsel joined a U.S. global firm’s London PE and M&A partnership on 3 August 2026. Those are named moves of a type, not a census. The company still cannot assume 2026 classes will spill in-house at scale.