Though the dust has scarcely settled in this year’s law-firm salary derby, the 2007 race is already heating up.

Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione is raising its first-year associate salaries to $120,000, effective Jan. 1, at its Newark, N.J., and New York offices. That’s a 23 percent jump from the 2006 rate of $97,000.