Market · Digital infrastructure
Data center entitlement counsel in Santa Clara.
One city government issues the use permit, hears the appeal and sells the electricity. That is not a quirk of local administration. It is the reason a general counsel here needs a hearing lawyer on the payroll rather than a technology lawyer with a land-use interest.
The permit authority and the power company are the same government.
Santa Clara counted 56 active or under-construction stand-alone data centers inside 18.41 square miles in its study-session report of 20 May 2025, and every one of them buys electricity from a utility the city owns. Sartori maps roughly 6,000 lawyers across this part of the Bay Area, and the shortage that shows up is not transactional. A general counsel hiring data center entitlement counsel here needs someone who can carry a conditional use permit through a Planning Commission that has voted no twice, and then negotiate a substation agreement with the council that overruled it.
The City counted 56 active or under-construction stand-alone data centers on 20 May 2025, with two more approved but not started and one application in staff review. Approvals run back to 1996. A repeat process, not a novelty.
Each lens is developed below. If you are deciding whether to build the seat or keep instructing outward, start with where the seat sits today.
- 56
- Stand-alone data centers active or under constructionPlus two approved but not started, one in staff review
- City of Santa Clara report 25-448, 20 May 2025
- 9 MW
- Ceiling on an ancillary data center before a permit is neededAnd 20 percent of the building floor area
- Santa Clara City Code section 18.60.090, in force February 2024
- 90%
- Share of utility revenue taken by large customersResidential accounts supply about 5 percent of it
- Utility director to a legislative hearing, 28 January 2026
- 7 days
- Window to appeal a Commission decision to the CouncilTwo 2024 refusals were reversed on that route
- Santa Clara City Code section 18.144.030
The government that grants the permit also sells the megawatts.
Most digital-infrastructure markets separate the land-use authority from the electricity supplier, and a legal department deals with two institutions on two timetables. Santa Clara does not, and that single structural fact reorganises what the internal seat has to be able to do.
Silicon Valley Power is not a vendor the City of Santa Clara happens to negotiate with. It is an enterprise of the city, established in 1896, and its governing board is the City Council. On the December 2025 utility fact sheet it serves 62,447 accounts across 18.41 square miles, records a peak demand of 746.5 MW, and sold 5,028 GWh at retail in 2025, of which 92.1 percent went to industrial accounts. That last number is the shape of the franchise: this is an industrial utility with a residential department attached, not the other way round.
For a chief legal officer the consequence is procedural rather than political. The body that will decide whether a use permit is granted is the same body that approves the rates, the substation agreements and the load-development fees under which the building will be energized. A concession offered in one conversation is visible in the other. The sequencing question — whether to settle the power terms before the land-use hearing, or to hold them open as leverage — is a commercial judgment on a public record, and it is not a judgment that can be delegated to a firm that has been asked about one file.
The utility changed its own instruments in a way that made this sharper. Speaking to a joint legislative hearing on 28 January 2026, as the American Public Power Association reported that March, its director described stopping will-serve letters in 2021 and replacing them with system limitation notices, system impact studies and substation agreements carrying ramped delivery. Customers taking dedicated service at 60 kV — typically 50 MW to 100 MW — fund their own substations and line extensions, and a load-development fee allocates a share of system expansion to them. The utility’s director put that fee at roughly $30 million for a new 50 MW center in remarks reported by the Silicon Valley Voice in September 2025. A will-serve letter was a piece of correspondence. A substation agreement with a ramp, a fee and credit support is a negotiated instrument with a balance-sheet consequence, and it belongs to whoever owns the company’s position.
The city has an interest in the answer too, and it publishes it. Staff estimated in the 20 May 2025 report that data centers contributed about $40.96 million to the general fund in that fiscal year — the five percent transfer of utility gross receipts reauthorised by voters in November 2022, plus property and sales tax — or roughly 13 percent of the fund. A council that depends on a sector to that degree, and that must simultaneously answer residents on noise, height and massing, is not a neutral counterparty. It is a counterparty with two constituencies, which is a describable negotiating position rather than an obstacle.
Two institutionsOne institution
- Zoning authority Grants or refuses the use, sets the height, noise and screening conditions, takes the neighbor testimony and owns the record that any later challenge is decided on.
- Electricity supplier Studies the load, builds or declines to build the substation, writes the ramp and the credit terms, and decides when an entitled building becomes an energized one.
- The same council Here both roles answer to one elected body that also books the revenue. The question stops being which regulator to persuade and becomes which file to open first, and with whom.
In this city the planning authority and the power company answer to the same seven votes. That is one negotiation with two agendas, not two negotiations.
Four bodies, one building, and no by-right path.
The reason this work resists being split among specialists is that the authorisations are sequential and each one conditions the next. A candidate who owns the first two and has never seen the third will hand a general counsel a permitted building that cannot lawfully run its generators.
Start with the land use. Under the zoning code in force since February 2024, a stand-alone data center in the Office and research-and-development districts and in the Industrial districts is a conditional use, decided by the Planning Commission. An ancillary data center — one subordinate to an industrial occupier’s primary use — is permitted by right, but only while it stays at or under 20 percent of the building’s floor area and a maximum draw of 9 MW. Those two caps are the quiet trap in a growth plan. A tenant that fills a hall converts an accessory use into a noticed application, and the person who notices that first is either the general counsel or the neighbor.
The findings are discretionary and the standards are thin. The code’s development standards for this use run to facade differentiation, cutoff lighting and structural noise reduction to the satisfaction of the community development director, and the city’s own 2025 study-session material records that it has no objective standards for data centers beyond those. Height is a separate increment, taken as a minor modification within a 25 percent band alongside the permit. In practice that means the four-story hall an engineer wants is a noticed land-use finding, not a building-permit detail, and it is argued in front of commissioners who have heard the noise complaints from the last approval.
Then the generators leave the city entirely. California Public Resources Code section 25500 gives the California Energy Commission exclusive power to certify a thermal power plant of 50 MW or more, and section 25541 lets the Commission grant a Small Power Plant Exemption up to 100 MW where it finds no substantial adverse impact on the environment or on energy resources. The Commission is the lead agency for environmental review of that exemption, and the city and the air district then act as responsible agencies on its document. The Commission granted an exemption for a 96 MW backup facility on Martin Avenue by order on 12 June 2024; a separate Bowers Avenue exemption covers up to 72 MW across 32 Tier 4 compliant diesel engines. The 99 MW convention on local sites is a legal ceiling rather than an engineering preference, and it has to be defended including redundancy.
The air district is a separate authorisation with its own record. Under Bay Area Air Quality Management District rules a new or modified source increasing emissions by 10 lb/day or more of a controlled pollutant requires best available control technology, and the district’s guideline of December 2020, explained in a March 2021 frequently-asked-questions document, treats EPA Tier 4 as achieved in practice for emergency engines of 1,000 bhp or more. Engine procurement is therefore a permit condition on a long lead time. Two local authorisations show the pattern: a multi-engine standby bank at a Laurelwood site was permitted on 28 August 2024, and a McLaren permit approved on 19 August 2024 cut non-emergency testing hours from 50 to 37 a year on both new and existing engines — a condition that binds operations for the life of the site rather than for the life of the project. A release point within 1,000 feet of a school triggers public notice, which is a critical-path item that has to be mapped before the engine layout is frozen.
Two procedural questions sit underneath all of that and decide how much of it applies. The first is which code governs. The zoning update took effect in February 2024 for procedures and in August 2024 for the map, with a cleanup ordinance following that September, and the code preserves the prior regime for applications already deemed complete. A file deemed complete in 2023 is a different animal from a 2025 application on the same parcel, and the difference includes whether a generator bank rides a commission permit or a minor one. The second is the completeness clock itself. The state Permit Streamlining Act, in Government Code section 65920 and the sections that follow, runs against the city from the moment an application is deemed complete, which makes the completeness letter a litigation tripwire rather than an administrative formality. Neither question is answerable by a lawyer who has read the current code and not the transition.
The direction of travel is also worth reading. In June 2025 the Planning Commission, considering an amendment to a large planned-development overlay in the city, required that data centers be deleted from the list of permitted uses on two light-industrial parcels and that all data centers be made subject to a conditional use permit approved by the Commission rather than to a minor permit. That is a body tightening its own discretion inside a negotiated development agreement. A general counsel who assumed that a planned development insulated a portfolio from the hearing has an assumption worth testing before the next application, and someone internal has to be able to test it.
Water closes the stack. City code chapter 13.15 prohibits potable water for landscape irrigation where recycled water is available and requires recycled water for other non-potable uses on the same test, with on-site plans signed by the city, the regional recycling program and the state drinking-water division. The Valley Water joint policy committee recorded in its approved minutes of 23 May 2025 that 65 percent of Santa Clara data centers use recycled water and that the municipal system is 20 percent recycled. Cooling technology is therefore a permit question rather than an operations preference, and a hall that cannot take recycled supply needs a documented feasibility record rather than an understanding.
| Instrument | What triggers it | Deciding body | What the legal department has to hold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conditional use permit | Any stand-alone data center in Office/R&D or Industrial | Planning Commission, code in force February 2024 | Discretionary findings, noise and massing record, neighbor testimony |
| By-right ancillary safe harbour | At or under 20 percent of floor area and 9 MW | Community Development Department | Policing both caps as the tenant load grows |
| Height minor modification | Four-story halls above the district limit | Zoning Administrator, alongside the permit | A noticed finding, not a building-permit detail |
| Small Power Plant Exemption | Backup generation above the state jurisdictional threshold | California Energy Commission, as environmental lead | A state docket, an environmental document, a mitigation program |
| Authority to construct | Every engine in the yard | Bay Area Air Quality Management District | Tier 4 best available control, risk screening, school notice |
| Reliability-hour condition | Non-emergency testing and maintenance | Air-district permit condition under the state toxics measure | A continuing compliance file after occupancy, not a closing item |
| Recycled-water obligation | Non-potable use where recycled supply is available | City code chapter 13.15, with state drinking-water sign-off | An engineering report, or a documented feasibility exception |
| Substation agreement | Dedicated service at 60 kV | Silicon Valley Power, under the City Council | Load-development fee, ramp schedule, credit support |
Site controlEnergized building
- Land use The use permit and any height modification, argued in public on discretionary findings, with the neighbor record built into the file that a later challenge would be decided on.
- Generation and air The state exemption for the backup plant, then an independent air-district authorisation for the engines themselves, carrying control technology and testing-hour conditions that outlive construction.
- Power delivery The substation agreement, the load-development fee and the ramp, negotiated with the utility after the permit is in hand and long before the hall carries a customer.
Two counts of the same city, taken by two bodies.
A board paper that says Santa Clara has sixty data centers and 1,038 MW of demand will be corrected by the two public bodies that published those numbers, because they are counting different objects on different dates. A general counsel who cannot separate them cannot brief a board on exposure.
The city counts buildings. Its staff report of 20 May 2025 states that Santa Clara is home to 56 active or under-construction stand-alone data centers, with two further applications approved but not started and one under staff review, sited in the northern industrial and office districts and ranging from 1 MW to 99 MW of peak demand. That is a land-use census. It excludes ancillary halls inside other occupiers’ buildings, because those are not stand-alone facilities, and it says nothing about whether a counted building is drawing power.
The utility counts customers. Testifying to a joint legislative hearing on 28 January 2026, as reported that March, the director of Silicon Valley Power described approximately 60 data centers in operation on that utility’s own system, typically 50 MW to 100 MW each, accounting for 55 percent of power use. In its own load-research presentation to the state energy regulator, docketed on 18 July 2025, the utility described more than 70 energized data-center loads, a wider set again because it includes loads that are not stand-alone buildings. Three bodies, three counting rules, three numbers, none of them wrong.
Requested capacity is a fourth object and the one most often mistaken for demand. The California Energy Commission’s methodology memo of 15 April 2026, using utility data as of December 2025, records this utility’s data-center requested service capacity as 644 MW under signed agreement, 196 MW at application and 198 MW at inquiry — 1,038 MW in total. The Commission is explicit that requested capacity is not expected maximum operating demand, and it converts one into the other using a 67 percent utilization factor drawn from this utility’s own observation of its best-performing colocation customer. Against that, the recorded instantaneous system peak was 754.28 MW on 23 September 2025 — every customer class, not data centers alone.
The practical consequence is the gap between an entitled building and an earning one. The Los Angeles Times reported in November 2025 that shells in this city were standing finished and unenergised while a $450 million utility upgrade ran to a 2028 completion, with one operator still seeking the balance of 48 MW of critical IT load for a completed building. Whether that gap is a leasing problem or a legal one depends entirely on what the substation agreement said about the ramp, and on who negotiated it.
Sartori’s own research points at the same seam from inside the legal departments. Of the 250 structured interviews in our Santa Clara cohort, 88 were with lawyers holding in-house seats at operators, developers and powered-land platforms; across the 24 months to June 2026, 54 of those 88 told us the electricity agreement and the land-use application for the same building had been run by two internal teams that never met before signature. The number is uncomfortable because both teams were doing their jobs.
Who employs data center entitlement counsel, and who instructs it out.
Read the job descriptions rather than the practice pages. Across the postings reviewed for this article between November 2024 and August 2026, the word entitlements appears inside broad real-estate and construction seats at operators and developers, and almost never as a job title of its own.
A colocation operator advertised a corporate legal counsel role in October 2025 covering real estate, construction and energy, whose real-estate duties expressly include land acquisition, development and entitlements, and whose power duties include substation and transmission agreements and easements. The same employer advertised a vice president of legal for real estate and infrastructure in May 2026 whose responsibilities cover all construction contracting, zoning and planning, and whose stated duties include building and maintaining a network of external counsel and managing the spend. The second requisition is the more revealing of the two: it describes an in-house desk designed from the start to buy local land-use capability rather than to hold it.
On the hyperscale side the pattern is consistent and slightly different. An AI-infrastructure operator advertised an energy and infrastructure counsel with a Palo Alto option in 2026, covering interconnection, electricity service, power purchase agreements, construction and, in one bullet among many, permitting activities and land-use transactions — with an explicit instruction to coordinate with specialized outside counsel. A consumer-internet operator posted a data-infrastructure counsel in San Jose in June 2026 asking for developer agreements, power purchase, utility interconnection and renewables; it does not ask for hearing experience at all. Two employers with billions of dollars of exposure to local approvals, and neither requisition is for the person who stands at the lectern.
The seat that does name this work in full sits on the other side of the table. The city’s deputy city attorney class specification covers ordinances, contracts, leases, advice to the council and its boards, and administrative hearings, and the recruitment opened in November 2024 for that classification was created specifically to serve the electric utility and named land use including environmental review among the ideal candidate’s experience. A general counsel who wants to know what the complete brief looks like should read the municipal job description, because the municipality is the only employer in this market that has written the whole thing down.
Two title patterns are reliably mistaken for this seat, and both cost a search cycle. A large cloud employer posted a corporate counsel for infrastructure legal affairs in August 2026 that is semiconductor, hardware, supply chain and intellectual property work. A social platform posted a lead counsel for infrastructure and telecom in the same month covering fibre, indefeasible rights of use and cloud networking. Both read like this job in a search-results list, and neither would recognize a conditional use permit. When a head of legal forwards a shortlist assembled by title, this is where the misses come from.
| Buyer | Where the legal seat sits | Practice label on the requisition | Who carries the hearing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colocation or wholesale operator | In-house real estate, construction and energy desk | Entitlements, construction, substation agreements, leasing | External land-use counsel, instructed by the internal desk |
| Hyperscale or AI-infrastructure operator | In-house energy and infrastructure counsel | Developer agreements, power purchase, interconnection, permitting as one bullet | External, with explicit instruction to coordinate specialists |
| Developer or powered-land platform | In-house project counsel | Project finance, real estate, engineering and construction | External, and the internal seat carries the timetable |
| Municipal utility and city | In-house city attorney with a utility portfolio | Municipal, land use including environmental review, utility rates | In-house, on the other side of the table |
| Infrastructure fund or sponsor | Instructed out | Project finance, joint venture, platform acquisitions | External, and rarely the same firm as the land-use adviser |
| Electrical prime or integrator | In-house construction counsel | Multi-party construction contracts, change orders, claims | Not in scope; the prime is not the applicant |
| Enterprise occupier | Commercial counsel, energy managed outward | Supply, hardware and services agreements | External, with the utility agreement reviewed internally |
What a general counsel told us about the second refusal
A general counsel at a wholesale colocation platform described the moment the arrangement stopped working, and it was not the first refusal. The company had a good land-use firm, a competent internal real-estate lawyer and a development team that understood the site. What it did not have was anyone whose job it was to decide, inside a week, whether to appeal a commission vote or withdraw and re-notice with a lower roofline. The advice on both options was excellent and arrived promptly; the decision took eleven days, which is four days longer than the appeal window. Separately, a head of legal at a powered-land developer put the requisition problem more bluntly: the seat they had opened was called senior counsel, real estate, and the file that turned out to matter was an air permit, so they hired well and still instructed outward on the thing that moved.
The advice arrived in two days and the decision took eleven. The appeal window is seven, and nobody had been given the authority to close it.
The desk that buys the specialist is paid more than the specialist.
Disclosed bands across this market make an awkward comparison available. In the same eighteen months a general counsel can read what employers advertised for the lawyer who runs the panel, for the lawyer who does the permitting work inside a broader brief, and for the municipal lawyer who sits opposite both.
The internal bands cluster by function rather than by seniority. The colocation operator’s corporate legal counsel role, the one that names entitlements among its real-estate duties, advertised $179,000 to $269,000 on its San Francisco band in October 2025 for three to five years of experience. The same employer’s vice president of legal for real estate and infrastructure advertised $276,000 to $414,000 for the Bay Area in May 2026. An AI-infrastructure operator advertised an energy and infrastructure counsel with a Palo Alto option at $200,000 to $230,000 in 2026, with a citizenship or residency overlay attached to export-control eligibility that has nothing to do with the permit and everything to do with the candidate pool. A developer with a Bay Area headquarters advertised a senior counsel covering data-center and power development at $190,000 to $220,000, and a global operator advertised a senior legal counsel for investment and real estate at $200,000 to $250,000 in July 2026. An electrical prime contractor advertised a senior construction counsel in San Jose at $175,000 to $215,000 in August 2026.
Against that set, the municipal seat publishes the lowest number and the widest brief. The city’s deputy city attorney class specification shows $144,087 to $186,463, and the November 2024 recruitment for the utility portfolio in that classification advertised $133,229 to $172,412. The lawyer on the public side of both files — the permit and the substation agreement — is the cheapest lawyer in the market by a wide margin, which is a fact about how public salaries are set and also a fact about where deep local knowledge currently sits.
The pattern that matters to a chief legal officer is the direction of the gap. The highest advertised ceiling in this set belongs to a seat whose duties include building and managing a network of external counsel. The lowest belongs to the seat that actually runs the hearings. A company that reads those two bands and concludes it should buy the expensive seat has bought a manager of specialists without buying a specialist, which is a defensible structure but only if it is chosen deliberately.
Municipal deputy city attorney, utility portfolio
Published class specification. Ordinances, contracts, administrative hearings and, on the utility recruitment, land use including environmental review.
City class specification; recruitment opened November 2024Where the money argument actually lands
Compensation is rarely why a search of this kind stalls, and our own numbers say so. Across the same Santa Clara cohort of structured interviews, 41 of the 88 respondents holding in-house digital-infrastructure seats named the seven-day appeal window — not the package, not the location — as the point at which their outside-counsel arrangement had failed them, over the 24 months to June 2026. A general counsel who reads that as an argument for a bigger budget has read it backwards. It is an argument for a defined internal decision-maker, which is usually cheaper than the arrangement it replaces.
The highest advertised ceiling in this market belongs to the lawyer who hires the specialists. The lowest belongs to the lawyer who runs the hearings.
A small pool, and most of it has never worked inside a company.
The candidate set for this seat is legible and narrow. It comes from four places, three of which have never had to make a commercial decision under a filing clock, and one of which is on the public payroll and is not in the market.
The deepest concentration is at the California land-use and environmental firms that have entitled these buildings for two decades. They know the commissioners, the noise consultants and the sequence, and they are the reason the failure rate on these applications is as low as it is. The transition risk is the standard one and it is real: an excellent adviser is not automatically an owner, and the difference shows up in the first month rather than the first year, in exactly the situations where a decision has to be made before the advice is complete.
The second source is the in-house real-estate and construction bench already inside operators and developers. These lawyers hold the commercial relationships, run the contractors and understand the site economics, and a material share of them have sat through hearings as the client rather than as counsel. They are the most common internal answer and the most common near-miss, because the skill that separates them is whether they have ever owned the record rather than attended it.
The third is the municipal side: city attorneys and deputies who have advised a planning commission, drafted the conditions and reviewed the utility agreements as to form. On paper they are the closest match in the market. In practice they are the hardest group to move, because the pay gap runs the wrong way for a lateral conversation to be easy, and because the same person is often the institutional memory their employer cannot replace.
The fourth is the state energy regulatory bar, and it is the one where a general counsel is most likely to hire confidently and wrongly. This municipal utility is not rate-regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission; its rates, its substation agreements and its load-development fees are set by the City Council, and its resource planning is overseen by the state energy regulator. A candidate whose energy practice is built on general rate cases has less transferable ground here than a resume suggests. San Jose, immediately next door, is served by an investor-owned utility under a different regulatory regime entirely — which is worth naming only so that nobody assumes a South Bay energy background is one market.
The public record shows how the utility itself resolves that problem, and it is a useful template. On the service list for a transmission application before the California Public Utilities Commission, last amended in April 2026, the city appears as a party in its utility capacity, represented both by an assistant city attorney at city hall and by a specialist public-power firm with Washington and Sacramento offices. The applicant on the same list carries an in-house managing counsel and separate California counsel of record. That is the arrangement a legal department is being asked to reproduce: an internal holder who takes the position, plus a narrow specialist bought for the forum. It is also evidence for the composition of the pool, because the lawyers doing this work are listed in dockets and hearing minutes rather than in the market’s usual directories.
Knows the codeHas held the record
- Corporate and technology counsel Fluent in the commercial documents that surround the asset and largely untouched by the discretionary approvals that decide whether the asset exists. The most common wrong shortlist in this city.
- Real estate and construction counsel Already inside the company, already at the site meetings, and usually one step away. The question is whether they have owned a public record or attended one.
- Municipal land-use practitioner Has stood at the lectern, written findings that had to survive a vote, and read a utility agreement drafted by the same government. The closest fit, and the hardest to move.
What our mapping does not see
Sartori maps roughly 6,000 lawyers across this part of the Bay Area, and the coverage is thinner on this bench than on any other we track here. The reason is mechanical. A municipal land-use practitioner’s output lives in council packets, staff reports and hearing minutes rather than in the places a legal-market map ordinarily reads, and a lawyer who has run eleven successful applications may have no public profile that says so. When we describe this market to a client, we are describing the part of it that surfaces, and we say so before the engagement rather than after it.
The interview evidence points the same way from the other direction. In the second-quarter 2026 survey wave taken from the same Santa Clara cohort, 37 of the 88 respondents holding in-house digital-infrastructure seats said their department had absorbed hearing and permitting work into an existing real-estate or construction lawyer’s remit in the previous twelve months without opening a requisition. That is a real staffing response and an invisible one, and it is the main reason public posting data understates how many companies have already concluded they need the capability.
The seat is usually created rather than advertised. A real-estate lawyer absorbs the hearings, and nothing about it ever reaches the market.
Decide which forums the seat owns before you write the job title.
Almost every failure in this search is set before a candidate is approached. Either the requisition says which of the four forums the holder owns and who they escalate to, or it does not, and no amount of sourcing repairs the difference.
| Factor | What to interrogate | Weighs most for |
|---|---|---|
| Hearing record | Has the candidate stood at a public hearing on a discretionary use permit, or only reviewed the packet a firm prepared? | Every level of the seat |
| Record for review | Do they build the administrative record with a later challenge in mind, or only to win the vote in the room that night? | Sites facing organized opposition |
| Municipal utility fluency | Have they negotiated with a utility whose governing board is the same council that hears the land-use appeal? | Anything in this city |
| Air and water conditions | Do they treat testing-hour caps and recycled-water obligations as continuing compliance, or as closing conditions? | Operating portfolios |
| Panel direction | Have they set a budget and a division of labor with land-use and air counsel on a live application? | A first internal hire |
| Reporting line | Does the seat report to the general counsel, or into a development function that will not escalate a hearing date? | Structural, decided before the search |
The brief is the deliverable. A requisition that names the asset but not the authority produces a long search and a short tenure.
- Name the forums the seat owns. Commission hearing, state exemption docket, air permit, utility agreement. A seat that owns three of the four is a defensible design; a seat that owns none of them is a coordinator.
- Fix the reporting line first. Into the general counsel, or into a development function that will not escalate a hearing date. Candidates read that answer before they read the package.
- Separate this from the transactional hire. Leasing, financing and supply work is real and staffed elsewhere. One requisition covering all of it produces two shortlists and no offer.
- Give the holder decision rights on the clock. Seven days is not enough time to convene a committee, and every candidate worth hiring will ask what happens on day three.
- Budget four to seven months from a settled brief, not from the day the requisition opens.
The question is not what the work is. It is who signs, and whether that will be you.
- Ask who decides an appeal. If the answer is a committee with a monthly rhythm, the calendar will beat the governance and you will be the one who is asked why.
- Ask what happened last time. A company that has been refused once has a record and a habit. A company that has never been refused is buying its first, which is both an opportunity and a warning.
- Own one file end to end. Application through condition through compliance, as the named holder. That is the credential this market prices, and volume of advice does not substitute for it.
- Test the panel relationship. A seat that directs excellent land-use counsel is a stronger platform than one that replaces them, and the two are described identically in job descriptions.
- Explore quietly. A confidential conversation costs nothing. See our guide on making the move in-house.
- Q1 Can one named person decide an appeal inside seven days? If the answer is a committee → fix the delegation before opening a search, or the hire inherits a clock they cannot beat.
- Q2 Does anyone internally own the utility agreement and the permit together? If the two files sit with two teams → the first hire is the person who holds both, not a second specialist for one of them.
- Q3 Does the requisition separate hearing work from leasing and financing? If it does not → you are running two searches under one job title and will fill neither.
- → All three clear? Open a targeted, confidential search — and keep the panel, because this seat directs specialists rather than replacing them.
What our own telemetry says about filling it
We have worked the Santa Clara in-house market for 5 years, for colocation and wholesale operators, developers, powered-land platforms and their investors. Sartori’s Santa Clara mandate telemetry covers 15 closed in-house searches over the trailing three years, 93 percent of them completed, on a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months, with a counter-offer incidence of 29 percent and a median of 13 working days between offer and signature. Within that set, 6 were entitlement-anchored briefs rather than commercial ones, and those six behaved differently: they sat at the long end of the timeline band, and the reason was not candidate scarcity. It was that the shortlist could not be built until someone had decided which forums the seat would own.
The uncomfortable number is inside the same set. 3 of those 6 entitlement-anchored searches ran past the seven-month upper bound of our own stated band, and 1 of the 15 closed Santa Clara in-house searches did not complete at all. In two of the three that ran long, the delay was ours as much as the client’s: we opened on a brief that described the asset and not the forums, and a candidate who will stand at a public hearing does not accept a seat whose decision rights are undefined. We now decline to open this search until the delegation is written down, which costs a fortnight at the start and has saved considerably more at the end.
Two engagements, anonymized
A wholesale colocation platform with two Santa Clara campuses came to us in the first half of 2026 with a requisition for senior counsel, real estate, and no statement of decision rights. We spent three weeks turning it into a description of a seat that owned the use permit, the air permit and the substation agreement, reported to the general counsel, held a defined budget for land-use and air specialists, and could lodge or abandon an appeal without a committee. The search then ran 5 months from settled brief to signature. The successful candidate came from the municipal side rather than from private practice, and the deciding factor at offer was not the package: it was the sentence in the offer letter that gave them the appeal decision.
The second is less flattering and more useful. A powered-land developer backed by an infrastructure fund asked us to fill one seat covering entitlement, air permitting and project finance. We told the head of legal it was two hires, and opened anyway on the client’s instruction. Ten weeks later we had two credible shortlists with no overlap and a candidate on each who would have taken half the job. The mandate closed as an entitlement hire at 6 months and the finance work went back to the panel. It is one of the searches in that three-year window where the brief had to be rewritten mid-process, and we should have declined the original scope rather than proving it wrong at the client’s expense.
Common questions about hiring entitlement counsel in Santa Clara
What does data center entitlement counsel do in Santa Clara that a technology lawyer does not?
Carry a conditional use permit through a public hearing, on findings that have been discretionary since February 2024. Under the zoning code in force since that date, a stand-alone data center in the Office/R&D and Industrial districts is a conditional use, decided by the Planning Commission on discretionary findings rather than issued over the counter. An ancillary data center is permitted by right only while it stays at or under 20 percent of the building’s floor area and 9 MW; cross either cap and the by-right accessory use becomes a noticed application. The holder of this seat writes the findings, handles the neighbor and noise record, runs the height modification alongside the permit, and keeps the administrative record clean enough to survive review. None of that is transactional work, and none of it is learned on a licensing deal.
Why does the city owning the utility change who we should hire?
Because the same council decides both files, and has done since the city founded its own utility in 1896. Silicon Valley Power is an enterprise of the City of Santa Clara, and its governing board is the City Council that also hears appeals from the Planning Commission. A general counsel therefore has one counterparty across two negotiations: the discretionary land-use approval, and the substation agreement, load-development fee and ramp schedule that decide when the building energizes. The utility told state legislators at a hearing on 28 January 2026 that it stopped issuing will-serve letters in 2021 and now runs system impact studies and ramped substation agreements instead (American Public Power Association, March 2026). Sequencing those two conversations is a judgment call, and it is an internal one.
At what point does backup generation stop being a city question?
At 50 MW. California Public Resources Code section 25500 gives the California Energy Commission exclusive power to certify thermal power plants of 50 MW or more, and section 25541 lets the Commission grant a Small Power Plant Exemption up to 100 MW where it finds no substantial adverse impact. Above 100 MW the path is a full application for certification. That is why generator yards on Santa Clara sites are designed at 99 MW rather than 101 MW. The Commission granted an exemption for a 96 MW backup facility on Martin Avenue on 12 June 2024, and a separate Bowers Avenue exemption covers up to 72 MW across 32 Tier 4 diesel engines. After the exemption, the air district still has to issue its own authority to construct.
What are companies paying for this seat in the Bay Area in 2026?
Advertised base ceilings run from about $186,500 to $414,000, and the entitlement work sits low in that range. A colocation operator advertised a corporate legal counsel role naming entitlements among its real-estate duties at $179,000–$269,000 on a San Francisco band in October 2025; the same employer advertised a vice president of legal for real estate and infrastructure at $276,000–$414,000 for the Bay Area in May 2026, a seat whose duties include building and managing a network of external counsel. An AI-infrastructure operator advertised an energy and infrastructure counsel with a Palo Alto option at $200,000–$230,000 in 2026, with permitting as one bullet among many. The municipal side publishes lowest: the deputy city attorney class specification that covers the electric-utility portfolio shows $144,087–$186,463.
Can outside counsel hold the entitlement file instead of an internal hire?
Outside counsel argues; only the company decides, and on an appeal it decides within seven days. The California land-use firms doing this work are genuinely good at it, and every in-house requisition we reviewed names the direction of external counsel as a duty of the seat rather than as a substitute for it. What a panel firm cannot do is choose whether to accept a condition that caps generator testing hours, decide whether to lodge a seven-day appeal to the City Council or re-notice, or trade a concession in the land-use hearing against a term in the substation agreement. Those are commercial decisions made under a clock. The realistic structure for most companies is both: an internal holder who decides, and specialist land-use and air counsel who file.
How long does the search take, and what usually goes wrong?
Four to seven months, and the brief is usually the problem. Across the 15 Santa Clara in-house searches Sartori closed over the trailing three years, 93 percent completed, at a median of 13 working days between offer and signature and a counter-offer incidence of 29 percent. The failure mode is not shortlist quality. It is a requisition that asks for a technology-transactions background and then expects the hire to sit through a Planning Commission hearing, which describes two candidate pools that do not overlap and are priced differently.
City records, state dockets, utility filings and air permits.
Land-use mechanics, thresholds and hearing outcomes come from the city's own reports and code, and from the state and air-district records that sit above them. Load and capacity figures come from the utility's filings and from the state energy regulator. Compensation figures are advertised bands on individual requisitions and published classifications.
Sources & further reading
34 references- Sartori & Partners — Santa Clara Legal Talent Research Programme (250 structured interviews; ~6,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- City of Santa Clara — Report to Council 25-448, joint study session on data centers and related development regulations, with zoning code section 18.60.090 and the site map (20 May 2025) santaclara.legistar.com ↗
- City of Santa Clara — Bulletin: 56 active or under-construction stand-alone data centers (19 May 2025) content.govdelivery.com ↗
- City of Santa Clara — Zoning Code Update: all code sections and map in effect (procedures February 2024, map August 2024) content.govdelivery.com ↗
- American Public Power Association — Silicon Valley Power on strategies tied to data centers, reporting testimony of 28 January 2026 (5 March 2026) publicpower.org ↗
- Silicon Valley Power — Utility Fact Sheet, December 2025 (peak demand, accounts, retail sales by class) siliconvalleypower.com ↗
- Silicon Valley Power — Data Centers in Santa Clara (last updated 21 May 2026) siliconvalleypower.com ↗
- Silicon Valley Power — Comments and load forecast forms, California Energy Commission docket TN 267866 (9 December 2025) efiling.energy.ca.gov ↗
- Silicon Valley Power — Demand Analysis Working Group presentation on energised data-center load and utilisation, TN 264908 (docketed 18 July 2025) efiling.energy.ca.gov ↗
- California Energy Commission — Data center methodology memo, requested service capacity by utility (15 April 2026) energy.ca.gov ↗
- California Public Resources Code section 25500 — exclusive certification of thermal power plants leginfo.legislature.ca.gov ↗
- California Public Resources Code section 25541 — Small Power Plant Exemption up to 100 MW leginfo.legislature.ca.gov ↗
- California Energy Commission — Order 24-0612-03h, Martin Backup Generating Facility final EIR and Small Power Plant Exemption (12 June 2024) efiling.energy.ca.gov ↗
- California Energy Commission — Bowers Backup Generating Facility project page, 72 MW across 32 Tier 4 engines energy.ca.gov ↗
- CEQAnet — Notice of determination, Laurelwood data center authority to construct for a standby engine bank (BAAQMD approval 28 August 2024) ceqanet.lci.ca.gov ↗
- CEQAnet — Notice of determination, McLaren authority to construct and city addendum, testing hours cut from 50 to 37 a year (19 August 2024) ceqanet.lci.ca.gov ↗
- Bay Area Air Quality Management District — BACT/TBACT workbook and permitting manuals baaqmd.gov ↗
- Bay Area Air Quality Management District — Current rules, including Regulation 2-1-412 school notification baaqmd.gov ↗
- Bay Area Air Quality Management District — Revised BACT guideline for diesel backup generators of 1,000 bhp or more, frequently asked questions (17 March 2021) baaqmd.gov ↗
- City of Santa Clara — Recycled water requirements for developers, city code chapter 13.15 santaclaraca.gov ↗
- Valley Water — Joint Recycled Water Policy Advisory Committee approved minutes, recycled-water use at Santa Clara data centers (23 May 2025) assets.valleywater.org ↗
- Los Angeles Times — Data centers in Nvidia's hometown stand empty awaiting power, on the $450 million system upgrade due 2028 (10 November 2025) latimes.com ↗
- Silicon Valley Voice — Data centers as the city's third largest general fund revenue generator, on the load-development fee (15 September 2025) svvoice.com ↗
- Mayer Brown — Proposed California legislation aims to reshape land-use approvals for data centers (9 April 2026) mayerbrown.com ↗
- California Public Utilities Commission — Service list, application A.24-05-014, showing the municipal utility as a party with municipal and public-power counsel (last changed 15 April 2026) ia.cpuc.ca.gov ↗
- City of Santa Clara — Ordinance 2061 amending city code section 18.60.050, exempting fuel cells and photovoltaic panels from the use permit (adopted 23 May 2023) santaclara.legistar.com ↗
- California Public Utilities Code section 9621 — integrated resource planning for publicly owned utilities leginfo.legislature.ca.gov ↗
- California Government Code section 65920 — Permit Streamlining Act leginfo.legislature.ca.gov ↗
- City of Santa Clara — Deputy City Attorney I class specification, published salary band governmentjobs.com ↗
- Job posting — Legal Counsel, Corporate, colocation operator: real estate, construction and energy, entitlements named in the duties, San Francisco band (posted 16 October 2025) goinhouse.com ↗
- Job posting — VP, Legal, Real Estate & Infrastructure, colocation operator: construction contracting, zoning and planning, external-counsel network, Bay Area band (posted 3 May 2026) goinhouse.com ↗
- Job posting — Energy & Infrastructure Counsel, AI-infrastructure operator: permitting, easement and land-use transactions, Palo Alto among the locations (fetched August 2026) job-boards.greenhouse.io ↗
- Job posting — Senior Global Legal Counsel, Investment & Real Estate, global data center operator: six to nine years, selection of external regional counsel (posted 31 July 2026) goinhouse.com ↗
- Sartori & Partners — In-house counsel recruiting ↗
The City of Santa Clara counted stand-alone buildings that were active or under construction on 20 May 2025. Silicon Valley Power counted operating customers on its own system in testimony of 28 January 2026. The same utility counted energized data-center loads, a wider set that takes in loads inside other occupiers' buildings, in load research docketed 18 July 2025. Requested service capacity at agreement, application and inquiry stages is reported to the California Energy Commission as requested capacity, which that agency distinguishes from expected maximum operating demand. Megawatt figures in the instrument table are published floors rather than counts of sites that meet them. Compensation figures are advertised ranges on single requisitions and on a published municipal classification.
Our own figures — 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 cohorts, the survey waves and the mapping coverage behind every Sartori number quoted above.
Adjacent maps for the same buyer.
This seat sits between the local approvals that decide whether a building exists and the structural work of building a corporate legal department. These pieces extend the map without repeating this article's argument.
Northern Virginia Data Center Counsel
The other mature American entitlement market, where a court order reset a county's zoning maps and legal departments discovered what they had not staffed.
Read the corridor readHiring Your First General Counsel
The structural questions that decide whether a first senior legal hire works: scope, reporting line, budget authority and the work the seat will actually own.
Read the hiring guideIn-House Counsel Recruiting
How we build corporate legal departments: scoping the seat before the search, mapping quietly, and telling a company when a requisition is not ready.
See how we workA quiet conversation
Deciding whether to hold the entitlement file inside or keep instructing outward?
We build corporate legal departments in the South Bay, and we are as willing to tell a company that a requisition is not ready as to open a search. Confidential, no obligation.