Cravath Salary 2026: The Firm's Own Table

Law.com’s 15 April 2025 Am Law 100 ranking by gross revenue put Cravath at rank 49, with 532 lawyers, 90 equity partners and $1.2 billion in FY2024 gross revenue, up 9.09 percent. The 6 May 2025 Am Law 200 top-performers table printed RPL of $2,256,000, up 2.5 percent, and PEP of $6,850,000, up 13.2 percent. The 18 September 2025 Global 100-by-PEP table repeated PEP of $6,850,000 on 90 equity partners and $1.2 billion of revenue, global PEP rank 9 among Global 100-by-revenue firms. Those are FY2024 cells, published in 2025.

FY2025 is thinner in the open tables. Above the Law, on 15 April 2026, put Cravath RPL at $2.255 million, down 0.04 percent, rank 10 on the 2026 Am Law 100. The PEP top 10 that cycle ran from Wachtell at $12.152 million to Milbank at $7.620 million. Cravath is not on that list, so FY2025 PEP is not a sourced number here and is omitted. Am Law 100 aggregates for the same cycle, as Above the Law recorded in that 15 April 2026 write-up, included a 14 percent PEP rise and RPL gains at 92 of 100 firms. A 30 April 2026 Am Law summary put FY2025 gross revenue at $178.95 billion, up 13.0 percent; average RPL at $1.39 million, up 8.7 percent; average PEP at $3.59 million, up 14.0 percent; headcount at 128,868, up 4 percent; nonequity partners up about 7 percent against equity partners up 2 percent.

Reuters, on 6 December 2021, reported that Cravath moved off strictly seniority-based partner pay to modified lockstep, contribution plus tenure, and cited 2020 PEP of $4.576 million. Law.com, on 7 November 2023, confirmed creation of a nonequity “salary partner” tier; it did not publish a dollar band. The ABA Journal, on 8 November 2023, restated that the salaried nonequity role had been recently established. Individual equity-partner draws are not public. Salary-partner pay is not public. Anyone selling PEP as a partner salary is counting on the reader not opening the Am Law methodology.

Firm partnership announcements show the gate the associate lockstep still points at. The 20 November 2025 notice, effective 1 January 2026, listed new partners in Corporate (M&A; intellectual property) and Litigation (antitrust and general commercial; general commercial and securities), plus six of counsel. The 13 November 2024 notice, effective 1 January 2025, listed six new partners, all Corporate. The 20 June 2025 notice, effective 1 July 2025, listed two new partners — Corporate governance and Litigation — plus six of counsel. The partnership intake is still mostly Corporate deal work, with a smaller Litigation class and of-counsel as a parallel senior seat. Those labels are hiring-grade for a general counsel; they are not a published partner salary.

Over the trailing three years Sartori’s New York associate mandate telemetry records 33 closed searches, a 93 percent completion rate, a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks, and a median 11 working days from offer to signature. Counter-offers landed on 37 percent of those 33 closed associate files. Of those 33, 12 were company-side hires of Cravath-scale corporate or M&A associates in years 4 through 7, over that same 36-month window. Seven of those 12 closed inside the 6-to-12-week band. Five ran past 12 weeks on compensation structure — base versus total cash versus long-term incentive — not on shortlist quality.

Four of those 12 lost first-round compensation authority. The general counsel had budgeted ACC-median total cash against a printed stack that already sat on or above that cash line, and the board would not reopen equity on the first pass. Those four files are why a 93 percent completion rate is not a victory lap: they were re-scoped to a deputy or stretched past twelve weeks. They did not vanish, and they did not fill on the original brief. That conversion cost is the uncomfortable number on this page.

Two composites, category only. A NYSE-listed U.S. industrials company asked us to move a Cravath-peer M&A partner into an executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary seat, the first in-house role after a long firm career. The company had used that firm as outside counsel on combinations in the same industry. Cash was not the bind; the bind was whether the board would underwrite a partner-level package against an ACC CLO band that only clears in the $5 billion-plus total-target tail. The file closed in the tenth week after the equity committee met a second time. A PE-backed healthcare platform asked for a year-5 lockstep associate as associate general counsel, M&A and governance. The first offer honored year 4 to “reset” the in-house title. The candidate’s counter, consistent with the 37 percent incidence on the New York associate line, was the printed year-5 stack plus a signing bonus. We rewrote the brief to year 5 before the name circulated. Time-to-fill: nine weeks. No real company, firm or candidate is named in either file.

Bloomberg Law, on 17 June 2026, wrote that Cravath itself had lost at least nine partners year-to-date. That is a reporter’s count, not a firm headcount release, and it sits beside the C-suite exits: a listed building-materials EVP/general counsel in February 2026, a late-stage fintech president of corporate affairs in January 2026, a listed-media chief legal officer seated for 1 October 2026. The remaining equity pool captures more of the PEP average. The competing buyer is the company. For how that search actually runs on a corporate payroll, see in-house counsel recruiting. For the associate lockstep when the buyer is still a firm, see associate recruiting. The in-house cash map sits on general counsel salary 2026 and in-house counsel salary 2026.