IAM, we need to talk: the IAM Patent 1000 2027 submission form has changed shape — deadline 14 September 2026

Considerably more answer fields — and, for the first time, questions about fee ranges and revenue share.

We hold the Word versions of the submission forms for both the 2026 and the 2027 editions of the IAM Patent 1000, and we compared them line by line. The finding in one sentence: it is considerably more data, and it is different data. The blank form now carries 1,021 answer fields instead of 382, and the kind of information asked for has shifted. The submission deadline is Monday 14 September 2026.

The numbers

Both forms reached us as completed documents. To compare them fairly, we normalised repeated building blocks — practitioner profiles, matter descriptions — back to a single instance each. What follows describes the blank form, not the number of matters a firm chose to enter.

What the new matter block looks like

The change bites hardest where most of the work sits: the work highlights. Every matter now carries a classification layer that did not exist before. Reproduced, the head of a litigation matter reads like this:

Field structure reproduced in Law Business design. Field labels verbatim from the form; layout and colours are ours.

The familiar fields follow: client, individuals involved, jurisdictions, dates, disclosability — and, instead of one combined description, two separate text fields, one for what happened and one for why the matter mattered. A firm submitting twenty matters now makes roughly a thousand individual decisions that simply did not exist a year ago.

What is genuinely new

The most conspicuous addition is an entire section with no predecessor: “Practice Activity and Market Profile”. It asks for things only indirectly related to legal work:

• the fee arrangements most commonly used per practice area,
• the typical fee range per matter type, expressly to be converted into US dollars,
• the share of the firm’s total revenue attributable to patent work,
• client mix across eleven categories, plus splits for existing versus new clients, domestic versus international, and cross-border share,
• an AI adoption matrix covering eleven activities and four maturity levels, from “Not used” to “Standard practice”.

Add to that headcounts by role, headcounts by scientific discipline, the number of offices with patent capability, sixteen technology areas to tick, and a set of questions on how the practice is structured. New, too, is a data-use clause: submitted information may be used to produce “content and intelligence offerings” — not only the ranking itself.

What IAM no longer asks

The form has not only grown. It has also shed fields. That tends to get lost in the discussion, but it is a real relief when preparing a submission.

The clearest loss is the other side: in the form for the 2026 edition, “Opposing client counsel” appeared in every contentious matter; in the 2027 form it does not appear once. Anyone drafting matter texts no longer has to look up who acted against them. The classification rows arrive in exchange — and on balance each matter still takes considerably more work than before.

Is it still proportionate?

There is a real case for the change. Structured answers can be compared; free text can only be read. Anyone assessing sixty jurisdictions eventually hits the limits of prose, and for a smaller firm a tick is faster than a paragraph. That IAM states expressly that participation carries no cost belongs in the picture too.

The case against is where the effort now falls. The new mandatory fields are mostly not writing, they are data gathering: headcounts by role and by degree, revenue share, fee ranges, a dozen percentage splits. No firm has that lying ready, none of it can be carried over from last year’s submission, and much of it has to come from finance or from the partnership. A firm that used to start two weeks before the deadline will not get through this one.

And then there is the question the fee and revenue fields raise on their own: why does a ranking that sets out to reflect the quality of legal work need a firm’s price list and revenue share? It is not required for placement. It is useful for market reports — which is exactly what the new data-use clause names. That may be perfectly legitimate. It should simply be said out loud. Firms fill in those fields believing they are working on a ranking.

In fairness: each of the fee and revenue questions carries a “Prefer not to say” option. They are not compulsory. Firms will answer them anyway, because in a submission every blank field looks like a gap.

Our advice for the 2027 cycle: start earlier than usual, and draw a clean line between what the placement needs and what is market data. Not every field has to be completed. Anything that should stay confidential goes in yellow highlighting — that much has not changed.

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