What a commercial litigator earns in 2026, and what a general counsel invoices.

Brightflag’s 2025 edition of Hourly Rates in Am Law 100 Firms, covering billed rates from 1 January to 30 June 2025, puts the Am Law 100 blended billed rate at $1,145, up 8.3 percent versus 2024. Litigation partners at Am Law 1–25 firms averaged $1,594; at 26–50, $1,360. New York partners averaged $1,795. Associates at 1–25 billed $1,065. Top-25 firms billed 30.3 percent of hours at partner level, against 50 percent at firms ranked 76–100. Those are invoiced rates from a corporate e-billing corpus, not rack rates, and they are the number a head of legal actually signs.

LexisNexis CounselLink’s 2025 Trends Report, released 22 April 2025 from more than $67 billion of paid invoices, about 510,000 timekeepers and about 1.8 million matters, recorded 2024 as the first year the median partner at firms of 750 or more lawyers exceeded $1,000 an hour. Average partner rates rose 5.1 percent. Associate rate increases at the largest firms ran 10.8 percent against partner increases of 7.5 percent. Some partners billed over $2,300 an hour; high-end associates neared $2,000. Large Law held 49.3 percent of wallet. The associate raise on the W-2 and the associate raise on the invoice moved together. They are still two ledgers.

Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, published January 2026 with Georgetown Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession, puts litigation at 27 percent of 2024 hours and records +2.4 percent litigation demand in 2025, alongside M&A. The report calls that pairing highly atypical except in severe disruption, and attributes 2025’s surge to the second Trump administration’s regulatory and geoeconomic shock, including tariffs. Ninety percent of legal dollars remained on hourly arrangements. Average Am Law 100 lawyer standard rates cracked $1,000 in 2025; other segments sat around $600. The same report warns that general-counsel spending sentiment was deteriorating into mid-2026. If that contraction arrives, it hits utilization before it hits the published lockstep grid.

The department budget behind those hours is mostly flat. The 2025 Legal Department Operations Index, a July 2025 survey of 128 U.S. legal-department respondents with Legal Tracker analytics from more than 1,500 corporate law departments, found 55 percent of legal-department budgets flat or decreasing, 81 percent reporting increasing matter volumes, and 56 percent under-resourced. Estimated 2025 outside-counsel spend: mean $14,437,774, median $5,000,000. Fully loaded internal staff: mean $17,310,229, median $3,000,000. Traditional firms still took 86 percent of total spend in 2024. Forty-five percent of respondents were “General Counsel tasked to run legal operations.” The buyer is a chief legal officer with a cost-cutting mandate and a rising disputes line.

ACC’s 2025 Chief Legal Officers Survey, published 28 January 2025 from 772 CLOs across 48 countries, is the hiring decision in percentages. Forty-two percent reported higher litigation volume; 38 percent found litigation more complex; 60 percent experienced increased litigation expenses; 44 percent saw more internal investigations. Forty-three percent planned to increase the volume of work outsourced to law firms in 2025, up 17 points year over year, and 43 percent of those attributed the increase to the evolving global regulatory landscape. Only 30 percent planned to hire more lawyers, nearly half of those at larger companies. Forty-one percent of law departments had a cost-cutting mandate. Understaffing was the top barrier. Seventy-nine percent of CLOs report to the CEO; 83 percent in the United States. The company pays the invoice before it opens a Senior Counsel, Commercial Litigation seat.

Put one derived ratio on the buyer’s desk. Brightflag’s $1,145 blended Am Law 100 hour times Wells Fargo’s 1,589 hours per lawyer is $1,819,405 of invoiced work for one fully utilized large-firm lawyer-year. That is not a commercial-litigation headcount, and it is not an in-house W-2. It is why a general counsel can freeze disputes headcount and still watch the litigation line rise. Sartori’s quarterly survey since 2019 has not produced a national in-house commercial-litigation median either; we will not write one from that product.

We have worked the New York associate market for more than ten years, for law-firm litigation groups and for corporate legal departments that buy those hours. Over the last three years that desk closed 33 associate searches at a 94 percent completion rate, on a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks, with a median of 11 working days from offer to acceptance and a 37 percent counter-offer rate. Of those 33 closed files, 18 were commercial-litigation or disputes-adjacent mid-level seats, years 3 through 6, observed across the trailing 36 months. Eleven of the 18 closed into lockstep firm groups. Seven closed into in-house disputes desks.

Seven of those 18 required a rewritten brief before a shortlist would hold, because the company had specified a lockstep associate and an eight-to-twelve-year in-house matter-manager as the same requisition. That is the finding that does not flatter us: we took mandates that were not yet a seat. Five of the 18 ran past 12 weeks, past the typical window, because payroll versus panel was still undecided at week 8. Completion on the 33-file book still printed at 94 percent. Time-to-fill did not.

Inside that New York interview cohort, 214 of 312 general counsel, chief legal officers and heads of legal at U.S. companies with a New York commercial-disputes docket, over a 24-month window, said they would raise the panel invoice before they would open a Senior Counsel, Commercial Litigation W-2. One hundred twenty-eight of those 312 could not name the July 2026 first-year lockstep they were invoicing against. A general counsel at a PE-backed healthcare platform, speaking inside that window, put the spend in one line: the department had budgeted a Senior Counsel line and then spent it on panel hours because the live file was a qui tam, not a contracts docket. A head of legal at a New York-listed industrial issuer told us the California-registered in-house counsel already on payroll could advise and could not appear in California state court, so the lockstep invoice stayed for first-chair work.

Three anonymized composites from that associate book, described by tier and type only. An Am Law 100 New York litigation group briefed a year-4 commercial associate to staff Commercial Division contract files and SDNY backup; the search closed in 8 weeks, the candidate accepted in 11 working days, and the incumbent firm matched on a bonus, not on base. A PE-backed healthcare platform briefed an Assistant General Counsel – Litigation as if the person would first-chair a qui tam and also run the e-billing desk; the file sat for 14 weeks until the company split the work into a panel instruction and a 10-year in-house manager. An energy operator hired Counsel, Commercial Litigation in 10 weeks for contracts, environmental and class-action oversight; Delaware admission was not required because the work sat in SDNY and the New York Commercial Division.

Counter-offers on that associate book printed at the city rate of 37 percent. They moved bonus and start date more often than they moved the published lockstep base. A company that is hiring the in-house manager should not expect to win a year-5 lockstep associate on a national-median offer letter. A firm that is hiring the lockstep associate should not write the brief as if the candidate pool were the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation. Companies that call legal recruiters New York for this work are almost never briefing a first-year class seat; they are briefing a 7-to-12-year disputes manager, or they have not yet decided they are briefing an invoice.