The legal market has never paid junior lawyers more,
or wanted fewer of them.
A three-market read on lateral hiring, NQ pay and the entry-level bottleneck now forming across London, New York and Dubai.
In the last six weeks, Magic Circle firms locked in a uniform £150,000 newly qualified salary. Milbank reset the US associate scale to $235,000 for first years and $455,000 for eighth years, effective 1 July 2026, and a dozen firms matched within days. DIFC firms are quietly paying newly qualified lawyers north of £100,000 tax-free to relocate to Dubai. With any conventional reading, junior lawyers have never had it better.
Look at headcount rather than headline pay and a different picture appears. In the same window, 86 per cent of large US firms told researchers they plan to grow their associate ranks through 2027. Only 35 per cent plan to grow their first-year class. Firms want more associates. They increasingly do not want more first-year associates. That gap, quiet, structural, and largely unremarked, is the most important story in legal hiring right now, and it is happening in London, New York and Dubai at the same time, for three different local reasons that all point to the same direction.
The lateral market has genuinely never been busier
Start with the number that gets the headlines. US law firms made 3,009 lateral partner hires in 2025, a five-year high and a 10 per cent increase on the year before. Kirkland & Ellis alone accounted for 116 of them, more than 25 per cent ahead of the next firm on the list. A meaningful share of that surge, roughly 270 hires, came from government and regulatory bodies, led by US Attorneys' Offices and the Department of Justice, as senior lawyers who spent the last few years in public service moved back into private practice.
London has its own version of the same story. Sidley Austin has made 29 lateral partner hires in the city in three years, the latest a finance partner poached straight from Weil, which itself lost a London finance partner to Sidley within the same fortnight. K&L Gates lost four partners to the Australian firm Hamilton Locke. London litigation, in particular, is described by market commentators as defying broader economic volatility, with partner moves accelerating rather than slowing.
Dubai is running the same play from a different starting position. Cleary Gottlieb hired the former head of Clifford Chance's corporate practice. Clyde & Co pulled a partner from Brodies to offset departures elsewhere. CMS and Baker McKenzie have both relocated existing partners into Abu Dhabi to build out teams ahead of a 2026 capital markets regulatory overhaul that is expected to deepen finance and regulatory hiring further.
Practice area matters as much as market. Litigation accounted for 26 per cent of US lateral partner hiring in 2025, ahead of corporate at 16 per cent and intellectual property at eight per cent, a reminder that the loudest hiring story of the last two years, the M&A and private equity rebound, is not actually where the largest share of lateral movement is happening.
Meanwhile, the entry point is quietly narrowing
The UK got here first, largely by accident. When every Magic Circle firm pays the same £150,000 NQ salary, price stops being a lever firms can pull to compete for junior talent, and the competition shifts to something else: how few, and how good.
The result is a market where senior lateral demand and junior intake are moving in opposite directions at the same time. For candidates, that makes the first three years of qualification the point of greatest scarcity risk, and the point at which practice-area choice matters most.
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