Salary · New York in-house hiring
When an associate bonus outweighs the posted base.
A company hiring from a New York scale firm is not matching a salary cell. It is deciding whether the variable on the other side of the advertisement is the number that actually decides the seat.
The posted base is not the perimeter of the seat.
NALP's 2025 Associate Salary Survey put 56.5 percent of New York City offices at a $225,000 first-year base as of 1 January 2025. A company searching for an associate bonus match is asking when the variable it must fund outweighs that sticker.
Cravath paid New York and D.C. year-end and special bonuses on 12 December 2025, with a stay-through-payday rule and no hours gate. London was paid on 19 December 2025. A November start is a stay-through purchase.
The live associate scale owns the class-year cells. This page is the decision of when those cells, not the posted base, decide a company hire.
- 56.5%
- NYC offices at $225,000 first-year23 New York City offices reporting a first-year salary, as of 1 January 2025
- NALP 2025 Associate Salary Survey, June 2025 Bulletin+
- 23,200
- New York State in-house counsel, 2024Largest state count; BLS OEWS residual, not a bar census
- ACC U.S. In-house Counsel Population Statistics, 2025
- 16 days
- Median offer to acceptanceNew York in-house line; working days
- Sartori & Partners, New York mandate telemetry
- 28%
- Counter-offer incidenceSame New York in-house line, trailing three years
- Sartori & Partners, New York mandate telemetry
Sartori maps approximately 67,000 lawyers in New York. Quarterly surveys have run since 2019. That file records employer, title and admission. It does not record last year’s bonus, because Labor Law §194-a forbids asking and no public register carries it. The uncomfortable number in the New York file is the one we cannot see: realized lockstep cash. Everything below is written from published grids, in-house survey medians, and what general counsel in this city actually do when the two machines meet.
When an associate bonus outweighs posted base.
The associate salary cell on a New York posting is the base the statute requires. The variable becomes the decision once it is a material share of that base and the company is hiring the work that cell was paid to do.
In Sartori’s New York interview cohort, 412 respondents sitting as general counsel, chief legal officer, deputy general counsel or head of legal at New York companies over a 24-month window were asked what number actually moved a midlevel or senior associate out of a scale firm. 239 of those 412 named the lockstep year-end-plus-special cell, not the posted base, as the binding constraint for years 4 through 8.
The remaining 173 in the same 412 described a different problem: an in-house short-term incentive that could not be written high enough without breaking internal bands, or a head of HR who had approved a range before anyone put the lockstep cell next to it. A law firm salary scale is the machine the company is hiring out of. It is not the package the company is writing.
Combined bonus as a share of the January 2026 Cravath base is arithmetic on published cells, not a survey. Class of 2025: $21,000 on $225,000, or 9.3 percent, prorated for a first year. Class of 2024: 11.1 percent. Class of 2023: 15.4 percent. Class of 2022: 23.4 percent. Class of 2021: 26.0 percent. Class of 2020: 29.5 percent. Class of 2019: $130,000 on $420,000, or 31.0 percent. The ABA Journal, on 19 November 2025, noted that the 2025 bonus scale had been the same since 2021. The share of base rises through the mid-to-senior associate years even when the grid itself does not.
First-year combined cash is not a reason to reopen compensation. A general counsel hiring a newly qualified lawyer into an Attorney seat can usually live inside the posted range plus a 15 percent short-term incentive. The perimeter of the seat changes at the point where lockstep variable is no longer a thirteenth paycheck and starts to look like a quarter of annual cash. That is years 4 through 8, and it is why this page exists alongside the scale article rather than instead of it.
Class of 2025
$21,000 combined (prorated) on a $225,000 January 2026 base. A company Attorney seat can usually absorb this.
Cravath memorandum, 18 Nov 2025; share is arithmeticPosted base decidesVariable decides
- The advertisement A good-faith base range, legally stripped of bonuses. This is what a candidate reads and what a head of HR is asked to approve.
- The class cell Year-end plus special on a lockstep grid. Invisible on the posting, material from the midlevel years, and dated to a payday.
- The work Megadeal M&A, capital markets, investigations, DFS cyber. If the in-house seat will not own that work, the cell is the wrong number to match.
The posted range is the perimeter of the advertisement. The variable is the perimeter of the seat.
The bonus is not a loyalty payment. It is a claim on a 2025 deal cycle.
A chief legal officer who matches lockstep cash without naming the work is buying a class year. The 2025 capital calendar tells you which class years were actually occupied.
New York County held 102,325 registered attorneys at year-end 2025, inside an in-state total of 193,536, according to the Office of Court Administration. That is a registration address, not a count of in-house desks. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2025 population white paper, using a BLS OEWS residual through 2024, put New York State in-house counsel at 23,200 — the largest state figure, up from about 16,000 in 2019. The buyers sit in those departments. The lockstep grid sits in the firms they hire from.
Fortune Media, on 3 June 2026, put 43 Fortune 500 headquarters in New York City for the 2026 list, first among U.S. cities, and 53 in New York State. A general counsel in that density is not hiring a generic “corporate counsel.” The 2025 capital series tells you which desks were busy. LSEG Deals Intelligence, in its United States Investment Banking Review for full-year 2025 (data as of 2 January 2026), put any-U.S.-involvement announced M&A at $2.78 trillion, up 50.8 percent, with deal count down 9.7 percent to the lowest since 2019. U.S.-target announced M&A was $2.31 trillion, up 57.4 percent; deals over $5 billion were 59.3 percent of that value. High Technology was $585.5 billion of U.S.-target value, or 25.4 percent. U.S. investment-banking fees were $66.8 billion, up 12.3 percent.
Wells Fargo Corporate & Investment Banking, in its January 2026 M&A Market Pulse, put U.S. announced M&A at $2.3 trillion, up 57 percent, and U.S. sponsor activity at $1.2 trillion, up 70 percent, on 6,229 deals, down 10 percent. The two reads agree on the shape: dollars up, counts down, sponsors heavy. A New York in-house corporate or securities seat that is supposed to take work off a $1,000 rack rate is being built against that shape. It is a midlevel and senior associate product. NALP’s Class of 2024 national summary still sent 58.9 percent of employed graduates into private practice and only 7.0 percent into business, of which 32.6 percent were bar-admission required. NYU Law’s Class of 2025 sent 74.15 percent of employed graduates to New York and 87.80 percent of its law-firm jobs into firms of 501 or more lawyers. The associate is still made in the firm. The company hires the person the firm already trained on the deals above.
Thomson Reuters Institute, with the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, published the 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market on 7 January 2026. The Financial Insights panel is 184 U.S. firms (50 Am Law 100, 58 Second Hundred, 76 midsize). Average-firm demand, in billable hours, rose 1.9 percent in 2025. Midsize firms ran nearly 5 percent demand growth in the second half; the Am Law 100 “couldn’t crack 2 percent.” Worked rates rose 7.3 percent. Direct lawyer compensation rose 8.2 percent. Average Am Law 100 standard rates cracked $1,000; firms outside that segment sat around $600. Ninety percent of legal dollars were still hourly. That is the buyer’s other lever: send routine and mid-complexity work to midsize firms that do not print the lockstep grid, or pull the midlevel onto the payroll and stop paying the rack rate for it.
Listed-issuer legal department
New York City held 43 Fortune 500 headquarters in the 2026 ranking. A general counsel or chief legal officer here is hiring Attorney, Senior Attorney and Associate General Counsel seats against lockstep cash, not against a municipal pay scale.
Bank and fund legal desks
G-SIB legal risk, product advice and advocacy; alternative-asset Managing Director, Legal and Deputy General Counsel seats. These desks absorb midlevel funds, M&A and regulatory associates. They do not price a first-year cell.
Public-body contrast
The New York City Law Department runs approximately 1,000 attorneys. Assistant Corporation Counsel and Assistant United States Attorney seats absorb some firm talent. They do not match a Cravath-grid bonus, and they are not the buyer pricing this match.
Specialist overlays
DFS-covered cyber certification, SHIELD incident notice, securities investigations, bank-merger work. These are the matter types that make a midlevel associate expensive to lose and expensive to hire in-house.
Pay for this workDo not pay as if it were this work
- Megadeal and sponsor M&A U.S.-target dollars concentrated in fewer, larger deals. In-house corporate and securities counsel at issuers and sponsors. Midlevel, not newly qualified.
- Investigations and disclosure SEC fiscal 2025 still produced 456 enforcement actions. SDNY commenced 11,109 civil cases in the year ending 30 September 2025. Live desks, midlevel to Associate General Counsel.
- Not a 2024 rule that never landed Vacated private-fund adviser duties; RAISE duties from 2027. Name them so a brief does not smuggle them into a 2026 lockstep match.
Two New York clocks sit on top of that capital calendar and actually change who has to be on the payroll. The Department of Financial Services’ second amendment to 23 NYCRR Part 500 finished phase-in on 1 November 2025; the first complete-year certification was due 15 April 2026, signed by the highest-ranking executive and the CISO. SHIELD’s 30-day breach-notice outer bound has applied since 21 December 2024 to any company that owns or licenses New York residents’ private information. Those are in-house privacy, cyber and vendor-contract seats, often filled from financial-institutions and incident-response associates. They are not a reason to match a first-year cell. They are a reason a head of legal cannot treat the midlevel as optional.
The OCC’s interim final rule restoring expedited Bank Merger Act processing took effect on 15 May 2025. That is a cyclical reopening of bank-combination work for bank in-house M&A and regulatory counsel, not a new license type. The Fifth Circuit’s 5 June 2024 vacatur of the private-fund adviser package cuts the other way: New York fund sponsors were not required to staff a quarterly-statement machine from that rule. The RAISE Act, signed 19 December 2025 and pushed by Chapter 96 (27 March 2026) to an operative date of 1 January 2027, is a 2027 hiring clock, not a 2026 bonus driver. A general counsel who matches lockstep cash “because AI compliance” in 2026 is paying for a desk the statute has not yet opened.
A general counsel who prices only the Labor Law range underpays the cash the hire is leaving.
New York made the hide legal. The posted range is base. The variable lives in a separate conversation the company is not required to print, and is forbidden to reverse-engineer from salary history.
The posted range is the perimeter of the advertisement. The variable is the perimeter of the seat. New York Labor Law §194-b, effective 17 September 2023, requires private employers with four or more employees to disclose a compensation range and a job description in advertisements for jobs, promotions or transfers performed at least in part in New York, including remote roles that report to a New York supervisor, office or work site. NYSDOL’s proposed Subpart 194-2 text defines that range as the base rate of pay only and lists commissions, tips, bonuses and stock as items that must not be folded into it. They may be listed separately. They usually are not.
New York City got there first. Local Law 32 of 2022, effective 1 November 2022, makes it an unlawful discriminatory practice for a covered employer or employment agency to advertise a job, promotion or transfer without a good-faith minimum and maximum salary. The City Commission on Human Rights fact sheet dated 12 May 2022 states that salary does not include commissions, tips, bonuses or stock. A Manhattan in-house posting that complies with the Commission still hides the lockstep cell. City coverage began eleven months before the statewide statute. The design is the same: the advertisement is a base instrument.
Labor Law §194-a, effective 6 January 2020, closes the other door. Employers may not request salary-history information, including compensation and benefits, from an applicant or from other sources, and may not use that history to decide whether to interview or what to offer. Voluntary, unprompted disclosure is allowed. A company hiring a New York associate therefore cannot reverse-engineer last year’s lockstep bonus from the candidate. It must price from public grids and from its own short-term and long-term incentive machine. That is why published memoranda, not interviews about last year’s check, are the working input.
NALP’s 2025 U.S. Associate Salary Survey, as of 1 January 2025, is what a head of HR actually sees when the posting is being written. The overall first-year median base was $200,000 across 437 responding offices. In firms of 250 or fewer lawyers it was $150,000. In firms of more than 700 lawyers it was $215,000. The modal first-year figure was $225,000, in 32 percent of offices overall and 45 percent among firms of 701 or more. Six of 19 published cities had a $225,000 first-year median, including New York City. Table 3 of the June 2025 Bulletin+ put 56.5 percent of New York City offices reporting a first-year salary (23 offices in the table) at $225,000. That is the sticker on the advertisement. It is not the cash a Class of 2021 associate is leaving.
A general counsel who prices only the Labor Law range underpays the cash the hire is leaving.
In-house short-term incentive is not a lockstep cell with a different logo.
A chief legal officer who treats 15 percent of the new base as a substitute for a $95,000 lockstep cell is not matching variable. They are renaming it.
ACC/Empsight’s 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey is the in-house machine in public. Data are effective 1 March 2025. 1,632 self-reported U.S. respondents; 29 titles. Median base, short-term incentive eligibility, target, realized STI and total cash run as follows. Attorney: $148,000 base, 83 percent eligible, 15 percent target, $16,000 realized, $160,000 total cash. Senior Attorney: $201,000, 92 percent, 20 percent, $33,000, $228,000. Associate General Counsel: $245,000, 93 percent, 25 percent, $65,000, $294,000. Deputy General Counsel: $280,000, 96 percent, 30 percent, $82,000, $368,000. General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer: $330,000, 96 percent, 35 percent, $91,000, $410,000. Single-lawyer General Counsel: $234,000, 77 percent eligible, 20 percent target, $36,000 realized, $255,000 total cash.
The derived comparison is not a third survey. A Class of 2021 scale associate’s 2025 combined bonus is $95,000 on a $365,000 January 2026 base. That cell is larger than ACC median Attorney or Senior Attorney realized STI, and it sits above median Associate General Counsel realized STI as well. Lockstep special-plus-year-end at years 4 through 8 ($72,500 through $140,000) is a different order of variable from a 15 or 20 percent target on an in-house Attorney or Senior Attorney base. A head of legal who writes “15 percent of $245,000” and calls it a match has written $36,750 against a cell that prints $95,000. The gap is the hire.
For the company, the package has to be written as in-house cash, not as a translated lockstep cell.
- Long-term incentive is the other half. ACC 2025 puts Attorney LTI eligibility at 17 percent (17 percent target), Senior Attorney at 43 percent (20 percent), Associate General Counsel at 59 percent (30 percent), and General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer at 63 percent (40 percent). A cash-only match against a lockstep bonus is incomplete at AGC and above.
- Prior firm time is already in the medians. Seventy-seven percent of ACC 2025 respondents reported law-firm experience before the in-house seat. At Attorney level, that path carried a 16 percent median-base premium and 18 percent higher total cash. You are not paying extra for a rare origin. You are paying the going in-house rate for the common one.
- Company size moves the chief legal officer number more than title does. CLOs at companies with revenue greater than $5 billion make 44 percent more in base and 173 percent more in total target compensation than CLOs at companies under $1 billion, on the same survey. Do not use the all-company General Counsel median to price a Fortune-scale New York seat.
- Merit will not close a lockstep gap. Seventeen percent of respondents received a promotion; non-promoted merit increase mean was 3.5 percent, median 3.0 percent. A 3 percent raise does not replace a $75,000 cell the candidate is walking away from.
For the origin firm, the cell is a class year, a payday and, at some houses, an hours test you will not see.
- Matching was the 2025 story, not leaping. The ABA Journal’s 25 November 2025 update reported that Milbank matched the Cravath year-end and specials. Combined class totals ran $21,000 through $140,000. Bloomberg Law, as quoted there, said the pair’s match made an associate compensation war among prominent firms unlikely that cycle.
- Some firms publish an hours gate; Cravath did not. Above the Law’s 26 November 2025 tracker listed Skadden at 1,800 productive hours, Ropes & Gray at 1,900 creditable hours, and Paul Hastings, Hogan Lovells and A&O Shearman at 2,000. Cadwalader published 2,200 hours for 120 percent of year-end. A company cannot assume the published cell was paid in full.
- July 2026 reset the base, not the bonus grid. Milbank’s 2 June 2026 first-mover scale, $235,000 through $455,000, presumed effective 1 July 2026, came without a new year-end grid. Summer specials of $6,000 through $25,000 were announced 27 July 2026, paid 31 August 2026. Q3 conversations are about the new base. Q4 conversations are about the still-standing year-end cell.
| Associate year band | Typical in-house landing | ACC STI target | Does lockstep variable usually bind? | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Years 1-2 | Attorney | 15% target | Rarely | Combined lockstep cash is still a small share of base; the posted range is the conversation |
| Years 3-4 | Senior Attorney | 20% target | Sometimes | Variable is becoming material; stay-through in Q4 can still decide it |
| Years 5-6 | Associate General Counsel track | 25% target | Usually | Year-end plus special is larger than typical Senior Attorney STI dollars |
| Years 7-8 | AGC / counsel | 25-30% target | Almost always | Combined cell approaches a third of base; Q4 is a stay-through market |
Stay-through-payday is the market calendar that makes variable larger than the next paycheck.
Sartori has worked New York in-house search for more than ten years. The files that break are the ones that treat a November start date as a compensation detail rather than as the product.
Of 24 closed New York in-house searches over the trailing three years, 14 were Attorney, Senior Attorney or Associate General Counsel seats hired from scale-firm associate years 3 through 8. Nine of those 14 opened between September and January. Five of those nine deferred the start date past the December payday. Completion was still 94 percent on the full 24. The start date on the original brief was, in those five files, a fiction. Counter-offers appeared in 28 percent of New York in-house processes on the same desk. A candidate who is days from a published cell does not need a competing firm in order to stay. The origin firm is already paying them to wait.
Median offer-to-acceptance on that New York in-house line is 16 working days. The typical seat still takes 4 to 7 months to fill. Those two clocks are not in conflict. Sixteen days is the signature. Four to 7 months is the search, including the week the candidate will not resign. A head of HR who budgets the signature clock and not the stay-through clock will watch an accepted offer sit until January, then ask why the legal department is late.
Direct testimony, stripped of names. A general counsel at a New York-headquartered listed issuer told us, over that 24-month window, that the department posted a compliant Associate General Counsel range in October and “could not understand why the shortlist went quiet until the second week of December.” A head of legal at a PE-backed healthcare platform said the lockstep special on the candidate they wanted was larger than the entire short-term incentive budget for the seat; they rewrote the package in January, after payday, and closed. Both are role and organization type only. Neither is a quotation you can attribute to a person.
Three composites, presented as Sartori engagements, numbers inside the envelope. First: a New York-headquartered public company, Associate General Counsel for securities and M&A, opened in November against a year-5 scale associate. Offer accepted in 18 working days. Start date moved to the first Monday in January because the candidate would not forfeit the cell. Search closed inside 6 months. Second: an alternative-asset manager, Senior Attorney / Managing Director Legal seat, priced the posted base in October, took a counter-offer at stay-through, and rebriefed in January; the file still closed, at the top of the 4 to 7 month band. Third: a mid-market commercial Attorney seat, opened in March, years 1–2 origin. Combined lockstep cash at 9.3 to 11.1 percent of base did not bind. The search ran 4 months. Variable was not the product. The posted range was.
AnnouncementNext cycle
- The memo Mid-November. The grid is public. A general counsel who has not yet put the combined cell next to the posted range is already late for a year-end start.
- Stay-through Mid-December in New York. The candidate who is still at the firm on payday has been paid to wait. Offers that ignore this date do not join.
- The base reset Early July, when it comes. A higher printed base, the same standing bonus grid. Q3 is when a company can hire without buying stay-through.
| Origin firm | Hours gate, as published | Pay date, 2025 | What the company cannot see |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cravath | None published | 12 December 2025 | The cell is a date, not an hours test |
| Davis Polk | None published | 30 December 2025 | Later cash; still stay-through |
| Paul Weiss | None published; extra discretionary in early 2026 | 22 December 2025 | A second variable layer may still be unpaid |
| Milbank | None published | 31 December 2025 | Year-end on New Year's Eve; summer specials already paid |
| Skadden | 1,800 productive hours | 15 December 2025 | The company cannot see whether the gate was cleared |
| Ropes & Gray | 1,900 creditable hours | Not the Cravath date | Over-hours can lift year-end; still invisible on a posting |
The cheaper intervention is earlier, and it is a compensation conversation, not a recruiting one. Write the lockstep combined cell next to the §194-b range before the requisition is approved. Name the work the seat will own, so you are not matching a megadeal cell for a contracts desk. Open after payday if the hire can wait; open in September only if the company will fund stay-through in writing. Ask whether the origin firm publishes an hours gate, knowing you will not learn the answer from salary history. Put long-term incentive on the page at Associate General Counsel, where ACC 2025 says most of those seats already have it.
| Ask this first | What to interrogate | Prevents | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class year, not title | Which lockstep class is sitting across the table? Years 1-2 and years 6-8 are different products. | Matching a senior cell with an Attorney STI | General counsel / head of HR |
| Payday versus start date | Will this person still be at the firm on the published payment date? If yes, do not price a November start. | A signed offer that never joins | Hiring manager |
| Posted range versus cash left | The Labor Law range is base. Write the lockstep combined cell next to it before the brief is approved. | A posting that only the already-in-house will answer | Head of legal / HR |
| Hours gate at the origin firm | Does that firm publish a billable or productive-hours test? You will not learn the answer from the candidate's salary history. | Assuming the published cell was paid in full | Compensation / HR |
| In-house STI and LTI, written | Target percent, last two realized years for this title, equity eligibility. Do not improvise against a lockstep number. | A first-year package on a fifth-year seat | Chief legal officer |
| Work the bonus was buying | Megadeal M&A, capital markets, investigations, DFS cyber. If the seat will not own that work, do not pay as if it will. | Gold-plating a commercial contracts hire | General counsel |
- Q1 Is this a year-4-or-later scale associate, where combined cash is a material share of base? No → price the posted range and a normal in-house short-term incentive. Variable is not the product.
- Q2 Will the candidate still be at the firm on the published payment date? Yes, and you need them this side of payday → you are buying stay-through. Fund it or wait.
- Q3 Will the in-house seat own the work that cell was paid to do? No → you are matching a megadeal number for a different desk. Rewrite the brief, not the bonus.
- → All three yes? Match the variable. The posted base is no longer the decision.
Associate bonus, posted base, and the in-house match: common questions
When does an associate bonus matter more than base for a company hire?
From about the fourth lockstep year, when combined year-end and special cash is roughly a quarter of base. A Class of 2022 cell is 23.4 percent of the January 2026 Cravath base; a first-year cell is 9.3 percent and rarely decides the move. A New York general counsel hiring a midlevel or senior associate out of a scale firm is matching that variable against an in-house short-term incentive that, on the 2025 ACC/Empsight survey, realizes $33,000 at Senior Attorney and $65,000 at Associate General Counsel. The 2026 associate scale prints the cells; this page is the decision of when they bind.
What must a New York job posting disclose about bonuses?
Nothing inside the posted range. Labor Law §194-b, effective 17 September 2023, requires a good-faith base minimum and maximum; NYSDOL guidance lists bonuses among the items that must not be folded into that range. New York City Local Law 32 of 2022, effective 1 November 2022, is the same design eleven months earlier. A general counsel reading a compliant Attorney or Associate General Counsel advertisement never sees the lockstep cell the hire is leaving. Labor Law §194-a, in force since 6 January 2020, also bars asking what bonus the candidate last received.
How does in-house variable pay compare with lockstep year-end cash?
They are different machines. ACC/Empsight’s 2025 survey (1,632 respondents, data effective 1 March 2025) puts Attorney short-term incentive at a 15 percent target and $16,000 realized median, and General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer at a 35 percent target and $91,000 realized. Lockstep special-plus-year-end at years 4–8 prints $72,500–$140,000 on the 18 November 2025 Cravath memorandum. Matching an in-house associate salary band to a scale-firm base is the easy half of the conversation.
When should a general counsel open a New York search relative to December payday?
After payday if the hire can wait; in September only if the company will fund stay-through. Cravath paid New York and D.C. year-end and special bonuses on 12 December 2025, London a week later, with a stay-through-payday rule and no hours gate. Of 14 New York in-house searches Sartori closed over three years that pulled from scale-firm associate seats, 9 opened between September and January; 5 of those 9 deferred the start date past payday. A November offer that prices only the posted base is competing with cash that is days away.
What work is a New York scale-firm bonus actually buying in 2025 and 2026?
Fewer, larger deals, not a first-year volume hire. LSEG’s full-year 2025 investment-banking review (data as of 2 January 2026) put any-U.S.-involvement announced M&A at $2.78 trillion, up 50.8 percent, with deal count down 9.7 percent. Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law, on 7 January 2026, put Am Law 100 standard rates through $1,000 and average-firm demand up 1.9 percent. The in-house response is to pull midlevel corporate, securities and investigations counsel onto the payroll, or to send routine work to midsize firms that do not print the lockstep grid.
How long does a New York in-house search take, and how often do counter-offers appear?
Typical timeline is 4 to 7 months, with a median 16 working days from offer to acceptance. Sartori’s New York in-house desk closed 24 searches over the trailing three years at a 94 percent completion rate; counter-offers appeared in 28 percent of those processes. The stay-through calendar is what stretches the top of the band: a candidate who is days from a $75,000–$140,000 cell does not resign in November on a base match alone.
The memorandum, the in-house survey, the statute.
Lockstep cells come from the 18 November 2025 Cravath memorandum and the match reporting around it. In-house variable comes from ACC/Empsight 2025. The hide is Labor Law §194-b, Local Law 32 and §194-a. Deal demand is LSEG and Thomson Reuters. New York density is ACC, OCA and Fortune.
Sources and further reading
37 references- Sartori & Partners — New York Legal Talent Research Programme (1675 structured interviews; ~67,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- MEMORANDUM FOR ALL LAWYERS, November 18, 2025, Year-End Bonuses & 2026 Base Salaries abovethelaw.com ↗
- Cravath kicks off associate bonus season and other firms follow (19 November 2025) abajournal.com ↗
- Milbank announces bonuses; did it beat Cravath? (25 November 2025) abajournal.com ↗
- Associate Compensation Scorecard: Biglaw's 2025 Bonus Blitz abovethelaw.com ↗
- Associate Compensation Scorecard: The 2026 Summer Of Salary Increases abovethelaw.com ↗
- Despite Expectations, $225,000 Entry Associate Salaries Lag at Large Law Firms (28 May 2025) nalp.org ↗
- $225,000 Entry-Level Salaries Not Yet the Standard at Large Firms (June 2025) nalp.org ↗
- 2025 U.S. Associate Salary Survey Special Report to Survey Participants nalp.org ↗
- 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey Executive Summary acc.com ↗
- Association of Corporate Counsel and Empsight Release Industry-Leading, Comprehensive Data Report for In-house Professionals (16 September 2025) acc.com ↗
- ACC U.S. In-house Counsel Population Statistics (2025) acc.com ↗
- Location of Registered NY Attorneys as of the end of Calendar Year 2025 iappscontent.courts.state.ny.us ↗
- Class of 2024 National Summary Report nalp.org ↗
- Employment Data for Recent Graduates | NYU School of Law law.nyu.edu ↗
- Amazon Claims No. 1 Spot on the Fortune 500 (3 June 2026) fortunemedia.mediaroom.com ↗
- Pay Transparency | Department of Labor dol.ny.gov ↗
- Pay Transparency Law Frequently Asked Questions (P689 09/23) dol.ny.gov ↗
- Proposed Subpart 194-2 (28 August 2023 text) dol.ny.gov ↗
- Salary Transparency in Job Advertisements | NYC CCHR nyc.gov ↗
- Salary Transparency in Job Advertisements fact sheet (12 May 2022) nyc.gov ↗
- Salary History Ban - What You Need to Know ny.gov ↗
- United States Investment Banking Review Full Year 2025 thesource.lseg.com ↗
- M&A Market Pulse: 2025: A Banner Year for Dealmaking (January 2026) wellsfargomedia.com ↗
- 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market (7 January 2026) thomsonreuters.com ↗
- 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market (PDF) blogs.thomsonreuters.com ↗
- NAPFM v. SEC, 5th Cir., 5 June 2024 ca5.uscourts.gov ↗
- Fifth Circuit Vacates Private Fund Adviser Rule (7 June 2024) paulweiss.com ↗
- SEC Announces Enforcement Results for Fiscal Year 2025 (7 April 2026) sec.gov ↗
- Table C-1, U.S. District Courts, year ending 30 September 2025 uscourts.gov ↗
- 23 NYCRR 500 Second Amendment (1 November 2023) dfs.ny.gov ↗
- Governor Hochul Signs Online Safety Legislation (24 December 2024) governor.ny.gov ↗
- Governor Hochul Signs RAISE Act (19 December 2025) governor.ny.gov ↗
- A09449 / Chapter 96 (signed 27 March 2026) assembly.ny.gov ↗
- 90 Fed. Reg. 20561 (15 May 2025) occ.gov ↗
- Careers - New York City Law Department nyc.gov ↗
- Legal - Federal Reserve Bank of New York newyorkfed.org ↗
Bonus-as-share-of-base figures are arithmetic on published Cravath cells, not a NALP or ACC statistic, and not a realization rate. ACC medians are national self-reported in-house figures, not New York-only. NALP medians are office-average bases as of 1 January 2025. CES legal-services employment is not used as in-house headcount. Hours gates are published policy, not the share of associates who cleared them. London appears only as a pay date.
Our own numbers — the interview cohort, the mandate telemetry, the counter-offer incidence and the offer-to-acceptance window — come from the continuous research program described on our research page, which sets out the survey waves and the mapping coverage behind every Sartori figure quoted above. Methodology for how we work a search is on the methodology page.
The cells, the in-house bands, the desk that runs the search.
This page is the decision of when variable outweighs base. The scale page owns the grid. The in-house salary guide owns the package once you are no longer matching a lockstep cell.
BigLaw Associate Salary Scale 2026
The class-year base and bonus cells. Use it when you already know you must match the grid; come back here when the question is whether the variable, not the base, decides the hire.
See the scaleIn-House Counsel Salary 2026
Attorney through deputy general counsel cash, once the company is no longer matching a lockstep cell and is writing its own package.
View in-house rangesIn-house counsel recruiting
How we run the search for a general counsel, chief legal officer or head of legal who has to put a lawyer on the payroll.
See the in-house deskA quiet conversation
Matching a New York scale associate into an in-house seat?
We help general counsel, chief legal officers and heads of HR price the variable they are actually buying — and we are as willing to tell you the posted range is enough as to tell you it is not. Confidential, no obligation.