The surveys are on their way. Whether your clients answer them was decided in the days before they arrived.
On 27 August 2026 Legal 500 announced that client referees for the EMEA 2027 edition would be contacted in the week commencing Monday 31 August 2026. It concerns every firm that filed referees: “Please disregard the following email if you have not submitted referees for the Legal 500 EMEA 2027 edition.”
Referees receive a direct link to a redesigned questionnaire they can open in a browser or on a phone. The announcement names surveys@research.legal500.com as the sending address and describes the survey as multilingual for the first time — in nine languages according to Legal 500, German among them.
REFEREES CONTACTED
Week of 31 August 2026
Announced in the Legal 500 notice of 27 August 2026. The emails go out over several days, with reminders to follow.
Each referee is contacted once: “Only one, plus scheduled reminders” (Legal 500 FAQ).
SURVEYS SENT FROM
surveys@research.
legal500.com
Taken from the notice of 27 August 2026. The address is not published on legal500.com — verify it against the first survey a referee receives.
Why an unbriefed referee simply does not answer
Look at it from your client’s desk. An email arrives from an address they do not recognise, it contains a link, it asks for an assessment of a law firm — and nobody warned them it was coming. That is the exact pattern every in-house team is trained to treat as phishing. The message gets deleted, quarantined or left unopened. Not out of indifference, but because it looks like something you are not supposed to click.
The cost lands with the firm. Client feedback is one of the few components of the research a firm cannot write itself. Legal 500 asks referees for their views on “strengths, weaknesses, innovation, individuals”. If the answer never comes, that part of the picture is missing, and a carefully built submission stands there without outside confirmation.
The volume explains how little attention any single request receives: Legal 500 reports sending “more than 300,000 referee emails” in the course of its research. Yours is one of them — unless your client is expecting it.
The 2027 EMEA cycle: what happens when
The first wave has gone out, but the window has not closed. The emails run over several days and Legal 500 follows up with scheduled reminders. A referee who learns today what this is about can still respond when the reminder arrives.
| 3 August 2026 | The EMEA 2027 submission deadline passed (Nordics: 28 August 2026). The document itself can no longer be changed — referee feedback is the last lever left. |
| Right now | Work through the referee list and give every contact a short heads-up: who is writing, what it is for, and a request to reply promptly. |
| This week | Point referees to their spam and quarantine folders. With larger clients it is worth asking their IT team to allow the sending domain. |
| September 2026 | Reminders go out while follow-up research begins. Every late response still counts at this stage. |
| March 2027 | The EMEA 2027 edition is published (March 2027 per the research calendar). Feedback not given by then cannot be added later. |
For the next cycle: Legal 500 has tightened the referee data
Between the 2026 and 2027 editions Legal 500 raised the bar for referee spreadsheets. Where the 2026 guidance still said of individual fields “Technically, these fields are optional”, the 2027 guidance states: “Each piece of information requested in the spreadsheet serves a specific purpose and is mandatory.” An incomplete list is no longer a formality — it puts the submission itself at risk.
On numbers, the FAQ is explicit: “A good minimum guideline is at least 20 per practice area.” That is a floor, not a ceiling, and there is a practical reason for it. With twenty briefed contacts, the replies that come in cover for the ones that do not. With five unbriefed contacts, a single ignored email can leave a practice area with nothing.
Skipping the work only defers it. Referee coordination is the part of the ranking year that demands the least legal expertise and the most follow-through — and it is the only part you can still influence once the submission has been filed.
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- Legal 500: EMEA submission page
- Legal 500: FAQ, including a section on client referees
As at 1 September 2026. Based on the Legal 500 notice of 27 August 2026, the submission pages and research calendar on legal500.com, the Legal 500 FAQ and the “Referees explained” guidance for the 2026 and 2027 editions. The sending address and the number of survey languages come solely from that notice and are not published on legal500.com. Details may be changed by Legal 500.