Salary benchmarks
Transactional Attorney Salary 2026: Firm Cash vs Company Cash
A general counsel still posts 2025 in-house cash for a 2026 transactional seat. This page sets the dated lockstep, the ACC title ladder and the funds bands companies actually advertise — who earns the figure, who pays it, and why the posted number is not closing the search.
The company posts 2025 cash. The seat already earns 2026 lockstep.
A New York general counsel posting a 2026 transactional attorney salary is usually bidding a Senior Attorney cash number against the $235,000 first-year lockstep Milbank published for 1 July 2026.
Sartori maps roughly 67,000 lawyers in New York. That coverage is a density read of the feeder pool a company hires from, not a wage series. Google Ads Keyword Planner, measured 11 September 2026 across four countries, recorded 390 monthly searches on the string this page answers — earners and payers using the same query.
A super-large U.S. alternative-asset manager posted $135,000–$200,000 base on 2 September 2026 for an AVP funds attorney with four years of firm or in-house funds work. First-year matching-firm base as of 1 July 2026 is $235,000. Posted ceiling, junior floor.
Four reads of the same stall. The dated cash tables sit in the next section. Every public figure is cited below.
- $235,000
- First-year matching-firm base effective 1 July 2026 — the reservation wage a company is bidding against.
- Milbank announcement, 2 June 2026; Above the Law, 2 June 2026
- $228,000
- Median in-house Senior Attorney total cash as of 1 March 2025 — the number many general counsel still post.
- ACC / Empsight 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, 16 September 2025
- $294,000
- Median Associate General Counsel total cash on the same ACC survey — still below derived third-year lockstep all-in.
- ACC / Empsight 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, data effective 1 March 2025
- $455,000
- Eighth-year / senior associate base on the same 1 July 2026 matching-firm ladder.
- Milbank scale via TaxProf, 1 August 2026; Above the Law scorecard, 5 June 2026
Two cash systems behind a transactional lawyer salary.
Read the matching-firm class-year ladder next to the in-house title ladder a general counsel actually posts. They are not the same instrument, and they are not the same year.
On 2 June 2026, Milbank raised associate bases $10,000 for the classes of 2026 through 2022 and $20,000 for the classes of 2021 through 2018, effective 1 July 2026. Above the Law’s scorecard, opened 5 June 2026, lists McDermott (2 June), Quinn Emanuel (4 June), Sullivan & Cromwell (26 June) and Norton Rose Fulbright (30 June) among firms matching the $235,000 / $455,000 endpoints. That is lockstep associate base at matching U.S. large firms. It is not bonus, not counsel, and not every Am Law 200 office.
NALP’s 2025 Associate Salary Survey, as of 1 January 2025, still put the national first-year median at $200,000 and the median at firms of more than 700 lawyers at $215,000. The most frequently reported first-year figure was $225,000 — 32.0 percent of 437 responding offices, 44.7 percent of 701-plus offices — and it had become the standard first-year figure in Austin, Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco and the Washington, D.C. area. NALP states Class of 2025 salary data were collected before some large firms raised starting pay to $235,000 in June 2026. The survey is the market before the reset. The July ladder is the reservation wage after it.
| Class year | Seniority in 2026 | Base (1 July 2026) | Year-end bonus (18 Nov 2025) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class of 2026 | 1st year | $235,000 | Not published |
| Class of 2025 | 2nd year | $235,000 | $15,000 |
| Class of 2024 | 3rd year | $245,000 | $20,000 |
| Class of 2023 | 4th year | $270,000 | $30,000 |
| Class of 2022 | 5th year | $320,000 | $57,500 |
| Class of 2021 | 6th year | $385,000 | $75,000 |
| Class of 2020 | 7th year | $410,000 | $90,000 |
| Class of 2019 | 8th year | $440,000 | $105,000 |
| Class of 2018 | Senior | $455,000 | $115,000 |
Bonus figures are the year-end ladder only. ABA Journal, 19 November 2025, also reprints Cravath specials of $6,000 to $25,000; those are not guaranteed every cycle. Combining the 2026 bases with the 2025 year-end bonuses, excluding specials, produces derived all-in checkpoints of $255,000 (first-year), $327,500 (on a $270,000 base), $475,000 (on a $385,000 base) and $570,000 (on the $455,000 rung). That arithmetic is not a firm announcement.
The in-house cash a chief legal officer actually funds is a different ladder. ACC / Empsight’s 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, published 16 September 2025, is a self-reported sample of 1,632 U.S. in-house professionals, data effective 1 March 2025. Securities, antitrust and bankruptcy/creditor specialties tend to pay higher; IT, corporate contracts and entertainment tend to pay less. An Attorney with prior law-firm experience earns 16 percent more median base and 18 percent more total cash than peers without it; 77 percent of respondents had law-firm experience, and only 16 percent went law-school-to-in-house.
| In-house title | Median base | Median total cash | LTI eligibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attorney | $148,000 | $160,000 | 17% |
| Senior Attorney | $201,000 | $228,000 | 43% |
| Expert Attorney | $227,000 | $260,000 | — |
| Managing Attorney | $239,000 | $283,000 | — |
| Associate General Counsel | $245,000 | $294,000 | 59% |
| Deputy General Counsel | $280,000 | $368,000 | 67% |
| General Counsel — single lawyer | $234,000 | $255,000 | — |
| Chief Legal Officer (target direct) | — | $503,000 | 63% |
Attorney median total target direct
ACC / Empsight, data effective 1 March 2025 — the junior in-house cash a company still posts.
ACC 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey ↗I am posting 2025 cash for a 2026 funds associate.
The buyer is a general counsel. The competing employer is a transactional practice.
One skill set, two payrolls. The unfilled 2026 number is the company number. The reservation wage is set on the firm side of the same files.
A generalist on the businessA named deal cell
- Mini-GC generalist Corporate counsel who owns commercial, governance and the deals the business brings — the operating-company default.
- Funds legal and compliance VP/AVP titles reporting to the manager’s chief legal officer; formation, LPAs, Advisers Act and the deal with outside counsel still in the loop.
- Named M&A or capital-markets cell A specialist desk beside Corporate Development. The general counsel still signs the offer.
NALP’s Class of 2025 Selected Findings, released 5 August 2026 and measuring employment as of 16 March 2026, put 60.9 percent of employed graduates into private practice (19,869 jobs) and 6.7 percent into business (2,180 jobs). In-house lawyers were the most widely reported job type inside that business sector, at 23.7 percent of business positions. The 2026 company search therefore hires from the firm pipeline. It does not hire this seat from campus.
On the firm side, the work now sits under labels the firms themselves print. Kirkland & Ellis houses it under a single Transactional heading — mergers and acquisitions, private equity, capital markets, investment funds, debt finance, private credit, REITs, growth equity. Kirkland’s investment-funds page states that since January 2022 the practice has advised more than 1,100 unique sponsors on over 1,300 funds with capital commitments in excess of $1.73 trillion, with 620-plus attorneys focused on investment funds. Latham & Watkins markets the capital-structure work as Capital Strategies and the sponsor work as Private Capital, and cites 1,100-plus public-company clients and 6,660-plus debt and equity capital-markets transactions in 2021–2025. Simpson Thacher houses it under Corporate, with a dedicated private-equity practice. Skadden’s Corporate group states it has represented approximately 50 percent of the Fortune 250. Chambers USA 2026, as reported by Kirkland on 4 June 2026, ranked that firm Band 1 nationwide in Corporate/M&A: The Elite, private-equity buyouts and fund formation, high-yield capital markets, and banking and finance. Those labels are the competing employer, not a headcount of open seats.
A mega-cap U.S. public technology company’s own legal careers taxonomy splits lawyers into niche teams and corporate generalists who “work as mini general counsels for the businesses they support,” often transactional in nature, on a title ladder from Associate Corporate Counsel through Associate General Counsel. Corporate Development, a non-legal team, owns mergers, acquisitions and investments; Legal sits on those deals with that team. That is how an operating-company general counsel labels the seat. At a super-large U.S. alternative-asset manager, the 2026 Workday postings sit in Legal & Compliance: a New York VP (real estate) posted 18 August 2026 at $165,000–$250,000 base with a six-year gate, and a New York AVP funds attorney posted 2 September 2026 at $135,000–$200,000 base with a four-year gate and a J.D. required. Those ranges are posted, not paid. The same postings accept law-firm or in-house funds experience and call for securities licenses when the lawyer markets funds or sits in client meetings on products.
The general counsel is shopping a midlevel transactional owner on a budget that did not reset with lockstep.
- Budget is the constraint. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 State of the Corporate Law Department, published April 2026, found that as of the fourth quarter of 2025, 36 percent of general counsel expected to increase overall outside-counsel spend over the next year and 20 percent planned to decrease it. Nearly half named staffing and resource constraints as the top barrier to delivering more value.
- Company size moves the same title. ACC’s 2025 survey finds associate general counsel median base 36 percent higher at large companies, with a 75 percent total-compensation gap, and entry/mid-level Attorney median base 27 percent higher (total compensation 35 percent higher). Chief legal officers at companies with revenue above $5 billion earn 44 percent more base and 173 percent more total target compensation than peers under $1 billion.
- Registration is a gate, not a salary. New York’s 22 NYCRR Part 522 lets the Appellate Division register an attorney admitted elsewhere as in-house counsel for a New York organization without traditional New York admission; ACC’s 2023 explainer, still the tracker linked in 2026, counts 36 states that require some in-house registration and 13 that do not. Texas has not adopted the Model Rule 5.5(d) in-house exception.
The lawyer who earns the 2026 figure is almost always already on a firm transactional desk.
- Firm experience is the premium. Seventy-seven percent of ACC respondents had law-firm experience. An Attorney with that history earns 16 percent more median base. In-house counsel from top-20 law schools earn up to 39 percent more base at Attorney level. The company is buying a firm-trained deal lawyer, then asking that lawyer to take company cash.
- Merit will not close the reset. ACC reports a 3.5 percent average and 3.0 percent median merit increase for non-promoted in-house lawyers, and only 17 percent received a promotion. Thirteen percent of those promoted received a base increase above 20 percent. A three-percent cycle cannot match a $10,000–$20,000 lockstep step.
- Do not read the business median as this seat. NALP’s Class of 2025 business-sector median was flat at $100,000. That is entry-level, mixed in-house and non-legal business roles, ten months after graduation. It is not a four-year transactional counsel package.
The shortlist exists. The cash does not clear the class year.
We have worked the New York associate market for more than 10 years, for companies and for firms. Over the last three years we closed 33 associate searches at a 93 percent completion rate, on a typical timeline of 6 to 12 weeks.
Of those 33 closed New York associate searches over three years, 18 were transactional-desk files: funds and investment management, capital markets, private-equity deal work, or in-house corporate-counsel and funds legal-and-compliance seats. Of those 18, 12 had a company general counsel or chief legal officer as the buyer; six were firm-side lockstep associate hires. Of the 12 company-side files, nine opened with posted cash at or below the then-current first-year matching-firm base; seven of those nine required a cash or title revision to close.
Counter-offer incidence on the New York associate book is 37 percent. Of the 12 company-side transactional files, five drew a firm stay-put counter. Four of the 12 lost the first-choice candidate to that counter or to a competing firm offer; we closed three of those four on a second name. Five of the 12 exceeded the 12-week envelope even though the 33-search book still completed at 93 percent. That is the finding that does not flatter the company side of the same pool: the associate line closes; the posted in-house band is where the clock breaks. Sartori’s New York associate telemetry also cannot publish an in-house transactional median from our own book. We see what the lawyer currently earns and what the company first posts. We do not see the equity refresh the compensation committee never approved.
Across the same New York interview cohort, 244 respondents sat transactional desks over a 24-month window: 158 at firm Transactional, Corporate, capital-markets or funds seats, and 86 in in-house deal, funds or corporate-counsel roles. Of those 86, 61 were general counsel, chief legal officer or head of legal who had posted a transactional requisition in the window. Forty-four of those 61 said a posted band at the ACC Senior Attorney median total cash would not convert a four-to-six-year lockstep associate. Of the 158 firm-side lawyers, 119 said they would not take an in-house call below their current class-year base plus last year-end bonus.
A general counsel at a PE-backed software platform told us, without the survey language, “I am posting 2025 cash for a 2026 funds associate.” A head of legal at a super-large alternative-asset manager said four-year funds associates “will not take the meeting at two hundred.” Median offer-to-acceptance on the New York associate line is 11 working days. A company process that is still in committee on day 12 has already lost the auction to the firm that can match lockstep overnight.
They will not take the meeting at two hundred.
Deal hours restarted. The company budget did not.
The reservation wage is not a vibe. It is the hours a matching-firm transactional desk is running in 2026, paid at a scale that reset on 1 July.
Hours delayedHours concentrated
- H1 2025 mute Citi’s 2026 Client Advisory reads tariff announcements and rate-cut uncertainty as the delay on middle-market transactional work.
- Q3 2025 restart The same advisory says broad-based deal work then accelerated, with large-cap M&A, funds, secondaries and private credit among the demand drivers.
- 1 July 2026 scale Matching-firm bases reset while in-house merit cycles and legal-department budgets stayed on last year’s path.
- 2026 concentration Mega-deals, a record IPO print and a stock of continuation vehicles hold the midlevel on the firm side of the file.
SIFMA’s 2026 Capital Markets Fact Book, published 13 August 2026, records 2025 U.S. long-term fixed-income issuance of $11.5 trillion, up 9.7 percent; corporate bond issuance of $2.2 trillion, up 12.5 percent; municipal issuance of $587.3 billion; ABS of $517.4 billion, up 33.3 percent; U.S. equity issuance excluding SPACs of $232.6 billion; IPO deal value of $47.0 billion, up 50.0 percent; announced U.S. M&A of $2.6 trillion, up 58.0 percent; and completed M&A of $1.8 trillion, up 30.7 percent. Dealogic, compiled by Paul, Weiss with data as of 12 January 2026, put 2025 U.S. deal value at $2,482.5 billion, up 60.7 percent, on 11,000 deals. That is the workstream that consumes capital-markets, securities and finance lawyers. It is not a headcount.
The 2026 run-rate is still elevated. SIFMA’s 2Q26 equities quarterly records $198.5 billion of equity issuance excluding SPACs in the second quarter, with IPOs of $121.6 billion, driven largely by the SpaceX Nasdaq listing on 12 June 2026, which raised $86.2 billion. The companion fixed-income quarterly records $3.2 trillion of long-term issuance in 2Q26 and $732.6 billion of corporate bonds, up 41.3 percent year on year. LSEG, on 12 August 2026, called the first seven months the strongest opening ever recorded for U.S. targets, at $1.69 trillion. A deal lawyer salary at a matching firm is being paid out of that concentration, not out of a quiet mid-market.
Sponsor work is a second stock. Preqin’s US Buyouts 2026 primer, data as of January 2026, puts 2025 U.S. buyout deal value at $376 billion, more than 30 percent above 2024; exit value at $263 billion, the best since 2021; U.S.-focused buyout fundraising at $101 billion; and a global overhang of companies held five-plus years worth $989 billion. U.S.-buyout-focused continuation funds almost doubled capital raised, to $24 billion. Skadden, on 8 April 2026, citing Jefferies’ 2025 Global Secondary Market Review, put continuation vehicles at roughly 14 percent of sponsor-backed exit deal value globally in 2025, up from 5 percent in 2021. The Federal Open Market Committee, on 17 June 2026, held the federal-funds target at 3.50–3.75 percent. As long as that band holds, exit and IPO optionality stays constrained relative to 2021, which feeds funds, secondaries and continuation-vehicle seats more than a broad middle-market hiring wave.
The filing overlay did not vanish when the expanded Hart-Scott-Rodino form was walked back. The FTC and DOJ’s FY2025 HSR Report, released 2 July 2026, counts 2,006 transactions notified (against 2,031 in FY2024), 3,851 filings received, approximately 31.8 percent valued at more than $1 billion, 41 investigations with Second Requests, and 18 merger enforcement actions. Size-of-transaction threshold rose to $133.9 million effective 17 February 2026. The 2025 form applied from 10 February 2025 until 19 March 2026, when the Fifth Circuit denied a stay and the Premerger Notification Office accepted the pre-2025 form again; the agencies’ 25 March 2026 request for information states practitioners prepared and staff reviewed over 3,000 filings while the updated form was in force, and the appeal sits in abeyance through 31 December 2026. Delaware S.B. 21, signed 25 March 2025, rewrote controller-deal safe harbors under DGCL §144; it changed how going-privates are documented, not whether the hours exist. Treasury’s outbound investment rule, 31 C.F.R. Part 850, has been live since 2 January 2025. Defense-adjacent HSR-reportable deals also send a concurrent copy to the Department of War under NDAA FY2024 §857, which the Premerger Notification Office still treats as live after the form vacatur. None of that is a census of unfilled seats. It is why the midlevel the general counsel wants is busy.
Citi’s 2026 Hildebrandt Client Advisory records, through the first nine months of 2025, industry revenue up 11.3 percent, demand up 1.9 percent, rates up 9.6 percent and headcount up 2.9 percent, with equity-partner headcount down 0.5 percent and all growth from salaried lawyers. Eighty-six percent of large firms plan to increase overall associate ranks through 2027, but only 35 percent plan to increase first-year class size. Law.com, on 17 August 2026, reported a later Citi cut: demand up 4.2 percent through the first six months of 2026. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, January 2026, puts 2025 weekday-adjusted demand up 2.5 percent and names transactional practices — corporate general, M&A, banking and finance, real estate, and tax — among those that drove demand the strongest, in parallel with litigation. Average Am Law 100 standard rates cracked $1,000 in 2025, while everyone else averaged around $600; clients spent less per hour on the average legal service because work moved downstream. Lawyer compensation expenses rose nearly 8 percent. The 2026 Am Law 100, as summarized by Above the Law on 15 April 2026, had Kirkland & Ellis at $10.556 billion of gross revenue and Latham & Watkins at $8.300 billion, with 62 firms clearing $1 billion. That is the pool that can pay, and just did pay, the 1 July 2026 scale.
Price the seat on the file, not on last year's ACC median.
A company that wants a four-to-six-year transactional owner has to clear the class-year cash that owner already holds, or buy the gap with title, bonus and long-term incentive.
The first composite is a super-large U.S. alternative-asset manager that posted a New York Legal & Compliance AVP on its own Workday at $135,000–$200,000 base, J.D. required, four years of law-firm or in-house private-investment-fund work. Three lockstep associates in years four and five declined the approach before a conversation on bonus and deferred compensation was even scheduled. That file is approaches, not one of the 33 closed associate searches. The posted ceiling sat $35,000 under the 1 July 2026 first-year base.
The second composite is a U.S. public operating company whose general counsel opened a corporate-counsel requisition at the ACC Senior Attorney median total cash of $228,000. The shortlist was four-to-six-year capital-markets and M&A associates already on a $270,000–$320,000 base. After six weeks the requisition had not moved. The chief legal officer later revised toward an associate-general-counsel title with a bonus target and an equity grant. That revision is one of the seven company-side files inside the 12 that needed a cash or title change to close, and it still sat inside the 6-to-12-week associate-line envelope only because the committee moved in week seven.
The third composite is a PE-backed software platform that asked for a “deal lawyer” at Attorney cash and a commercial-contracts diet. Nine approaches to matching-firm transactional associates were declined. The tenth conversation was an in-house commercial counsel without a live M&A file. The general counsel stopped the process at week 14 rather than reprice. That is one of the five company-side transactional mandates in the trailing 36 months that exceeded 12 weeks. It is also the uncomfortable read: we can fill the firm chair on the same talent; we cannot invent a committee number that finance will not sign.
New York in-house registration under 22 NYCRR Part 522 is the credential gate, not the salary. It is available to a lawyer admitted in another U.S. jurisdiction who will serve only the employer and affiliates; there is currently no application fee. It is not a New York admission, and the registrant may not appear in a New York tribunal without pro hac vice. ACC’s multi-state map still treats Hawaii and Texas as outside the Model Rule 5.5(d) in-house exception. Write the brief for a J.D., an active U.S. bar, four to ten years of law-firm or funds transactional work, and a cash number that clears the class year. Then decide, in the same week, whether title, bonus and long-term incentive will buy the rest. Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Legal Department Operations Index found 46 percent of U.S. legal departments expected more work in-house: that is the make-versus-buy this seat is supposed to execute. A Senior Attorney with 43 percent LTI eligibility still needs a cash floor the lockstep associate will sign inside 11 working days.
Sartori & Partners runs a continuous research program over nearly 1.5 million lawyer profiles mapped globally, with quarterly market surveys since 2019. The New York findings on this page come from that program’s city book and from the associate-mandate telemetry cited above. If you are the general counsel trying to put this lawyer on the payroll, the conversation is a company search — see in-house counsel recruiting. If you are the associate weighing the move, the competing number is the matching-firm ladder on the 2026 BigLaw associate scale. For how we underwrite a mandate, see our methodology.
Transactional attorney salary in 2026: common questions
What is a typical transactional attorney salary at a U.S. company in 2026?
The median in-house Senior Attorney total cash was $228,000 as of 1 March 2025, per ACC / Empsight. That figure is self-reported across 1,632 U.S. in-house professionals, not a company HR extract. An Associate General Counsel median total cash was $294,000 on the same survey. A general counsel who posts either number against a four-to-six-year lockstep associate is posting below the cash that lawyer already takes home. Long-term incentive eligibility rises with title — 43 percent at Senior Attorney, 59 percent at associate general counsel — and is the lever that can close a gap cash will not.
What does a lockstep transactional associate earn in 2026?
Milbank reset matching-firm bases to $235,000 for the class of 2026/2025 through $455,000 for the class of 2018, effective 1 July 2026. Year-end bonuses last published by Cravath on 18 November 2025 run from $15,000 (class of 2025) to $115,000 (class of 2018). Combining those two vintages, without specials, produces derived all-in checkpoints of about $255,000 at the first year, $327,500 at a $270,000 base, $475,000 at a $385,000 base, and $570,000 at the $455,000 rung. The 2026 year-end scale had not been announced as of this research.
Why does a posted in-house number fail to fill a transactional seat?
Senior Attorney median total cash of $228,000 sits under the $235,000 first-year lockstep base. Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Legal Department Operations Index found 55 percent of U.S. legal departments on a flat or falling budget and 56 percent under-resourced, while ACC’s own merit median for non-promoted in-house lawyers was 3.0 percent. A 3 percent cycle cannot close a $10,000–$20,000 lockstep reset. The lawyer the general counsel wants is a midlevel the firms are trying to keep: NALP recorded a 97 percent offer rate from 2L summer to entry-level associate in the 2025 cycle.
Who hires the in-house transactional lawyer?
The general counsel or chief legal officer of the company signs the offer; only 6.7 percent of Class of 2025 jobs went to business. NALP counted 2,180 business jobs out of 32,619, and in-house lawyers were 23.7 percent of that business slice. The 2026 company search therefore hires from the firm pipeline, not from campus. At alternative-asset managers the desk is often Legal & Compliance reporting to the same chief legal officer, with posted titles VP or AVP rather than counsel.
How long does a New York transactional associate search take?
Sartori’s New York associate line typically fills in 6 to 12 weeks at a 93 percent completion rate. That is the 33-search book over three years, with a median 11 working days from offer to signature. Company-side transactional files inside that book run slower when the first posted band sits at 2025 ACC medians: five of twelve such mandates in the trailing 36 months exceeded 12 weeks.
Should a general counsel hire this seat or keep the work at a firm?
Forty-six percent of U.S. legal departments expected more work in-house in 2025, per Thomson Reuters. Bring repeating commercial, funds and mid-market M&A hours onto the payroll when the file needs a weekly owner. Keep a panel for mega-deals and Second Requests: LSEG recorded 48 announced transactions above $10 billion in January–July 2026, about 40 percent of global announced value. A requisition posted at Senior Attorney cash for a fifth-year lockstep owner has not chosen; it has stalled.
Lockstep announcements, ACC cash, deal-flow and filing series
Public figures on this page come from firm announcements, NALP and ACC surveys, Thomson Reuters and Citi demand series, SIFMA and LSEG volume, and the HSR docket. Sartori figures come from the New York associate research book.
Sources
44 references- Sartori & Partners — New York Legal Talent Research Programme (1,675 structured interviews; ~67,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- ALERT: Milbank Does It Again - Associate Salaries Are Going Up!!! abovethelaw.com ↗
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- Cravath Starts Biglaw's Bonus Season With Year-End And Special Bonuses! abovethelaw.com ↗
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- Employment for the Class of 2025 — Selected Findings nalp.org ↗
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- Law Firm Rates Report 2026: Law firms discover the hidden engine driving their pricing power thomsonreuters.com ↗
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- Premerger Notification Program ftc.gov ↗
- Department of War Filings ftc.gov ↗
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Lockstep bases are matching-firm associate scale, not every Am Law office. ACC cash is self-reported in-house packages, data effective 1 March 2025. Deal-flow series measure announced or completed volume, not attorney headcount. Posted Workday bands are advertised, not paid. Derived all-in combines two published vintages and is labeled as arithmetic.
Adjacent benches, not this table.
Corporate-attorney pay, M&A-attorney pay and entertainment transactional demand sit on sibling pages. These three stay next to this salary without restating it.
BigLaw associate salary scale 2026
The matching-firm class-year ladder this page bids against — bases, bonuses and lockstep mechanics.
Read the 2026 scaleIn-house counsel salary 2026
How company-side cash, bonus and equity stack once the seat is not a lockstep associate chair.
Read in-house payPrivate practice vs in-house pay
The trade a deal lawyer actually makes when leaving a firm desk for a general counsel's payroll.
Compare the two tracksPrice the seat
Hire the transactional lawyer the posted number is missing.
If you are a general counsel or chief legal officer trying to put a deal lawyer on the payroll, we map the lockstep reservation wage against the cash and title you can actually clear — before the requisition stalls.