The UAE legal-risk landscape, in numbers
Aggregate statistics from the official UAE court and regulatory records Counterscope indexes — court cases, judgments, regulatory actions and notices across DIFC, ADGM, DFSA, the mainland and the free zones. Counts only; no company is named.
These are corpus-wide totals, updated live. They reflect what Counterscope has indexed from the official sources on our coverage page — not the entire UAE economy.
Data last updated: 19 Jul 2026
As of 19 Jul 2026, Counterscope tracks 834,598 UAE entities and has extracted 52,379 legal events from 89,471 official court and regulatory records. The most common event type is Free-zone notification, with 33,660. Most are routine regulatory and free-zone notices rather than court litigation. Activity peaked in 2025, with 10,256 events. These are corpus-wide counts from the sources on our coverage page — no individual company is named.
Legal events by type
Free-zone notification | Count: 33,660 |
Court appeal | Count: 5,285 |
Civil lawsuit | Count: 3,867 |
Labour dispute | Count: 3,276 |
Commercial lawsuit | Count: 2,142 |
Judicial notice | Count: 2,026 |
Liquidation | Count: 1,257 |
Bankruptcy | Count: 344 |
Regulatory enforcement | Count: 341 |
Real-estate litigation | Count: 76 |
Corporate notification | Count: 63 |
Bounced cheque | Count: 22 |
Criminal (commercial) | Count: 14 |
Legal notice | Count: 3 |
Administrative claim | Count: 3 |
Risk-grade distribution
How Counterscope grades every entity it tracks (A = safest, E = highest risk). Most carry a standing grade derived from licence status and company age — an active, clean licence grades high; an expired, cancelled or struck-off one grades lower. Entities with adverse legal events are graded on that record.
A | Count: 10,530 |
B | Count: 269,072 |
C | Count: 296 |
D | Count: 25 |
E | Count: 27,205 |
Legal events by year
By the year the event occurred, where a date is on record.
2010 | Count: 50 |
2011 | Count: 29 |
2012 | Count: 34 |
2013 | Count: 33 |
2014 | Count: 92 |
2015 | Count: 81 |
2016 | Count: 89 |
2017 | Count: 1,653 |
2018 | Count: 1,790 |
2019 | Count: 3,297 |
2020 | Count: 2,927 |
2021 | Count: 2,066 |
2022 | Count: 2,628 |
2023 | Count: 10,054 |
2024 | Count: 10,073 |
2025 | Count: 10,256 |
2026 | Count: 6,714 |
See exactly which sources these come from, and how the grading works.