EU Law
Search for Linguists and Lawyers

The legal content available through this service is sourced from authoritative and high-quality EU repositories – primarily the EUR-Lex portal and the IATE terminology database. EU law is generally accessible freely, either through the EUR-Lex search interface or as bulk data via the EUR-Lex website.

The European Commission’s document reuse policy, established under Decision 2011/833/EU, allows for the reuse of legal documents published on EUR-Lex for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, unless otherwise specified. For detailed information on the reuse of EU legal content, please consult the EUR-Lex reuse policy page. For information on IATE data reuse, please visit the IATE data reuse page.

While EU legal documents are publicly available, their vast scope and intricate network of cross-references make efficient searching a significant challenge—particularly for translators, linguists, and legal professionals.

With hands-on experience in EU legal translation, we have leveraged these publicly available resources to develop a high-performance, domain-specific search engine designed to support professional workflows.

Each search result is presented in full context, allowing users to view the surrounding text within the originating document. A direct link to the complete document on EUR-Lex is also provided for every result.

Customization is not only possible – it’s central to how this service works.

While you can search across the entire body of EU law and retrieve thousands of results instantly, in practice it’s often far more efficient to focus on smaller, highly relevant subsets of documents.

The challenge of scale

The breadth of EU law is both a strength and a difficulty: the more data you include, the more overwhelming your results can become. To address this, the service offers powerful customization tools that let you define your own sets of legal documents – called custom indices – tailored to your workflow and priorities.

For example, EU legal translators often receive a list of reference documents or Celex numbers to follow. You can easily import such a list and limit your searches to exactly those documents – or expand to the full database whenever needed. As you work, you can also add new documents to your custom index with a few clicks.

Custom indices are currently available in the desktop application only, and each user may create up to three custom indices..

Absolutely.

If you’ve ever translated for the European Commission or similar institutions, you know that consistency is not optional. Each act must align perfectly with other referenced legal texts. No guessing, no paraphrasing — citations must be verbatim.

And there are often many of them. That means countless searches, every day. The faster the search, the smoother your workflow.

This tool was built specifically to make that process faster and more reliable. It lets translators keep precision without sacrificing time or productivity. You no longer have to choose between accuracy and efficiency — both are built in. .

Not yet — and that’s intentional.

The search results do not come from a large language model (LLM), but from a specialized database that stores EU legal content in a format designed for full-text search, structured queries, and real-time analytics.

There are two main reasons for this choice:

Accuracy: we need exact citations from official legal acts, not AI-generated interpretations.

Privacy: your search queries or documents are never shared with public AI systems or external cloud services.

In the future, certain AI elements may be introduced — for example, for terminology extraction or context analysis — but they will only operate on publicly available data, never on your own queries or translation content.

This is an active, evolving project.

It has already been tested extensively in real professional translation workflows, and after proving its reliability, it’s now being opened to the wider public.

You can expect regular updates with new features and refinements — always built around the same core idea: fast, precise, privacy-conscious search in EU law. We also welcome feedback from translators and legal professionals — your suggestions directly influence what comes next.

Click here to share your feedback or feature ideas.

This section will soon provide background information about the author, professional experience in legal translation, and the motivations for building LegisTracerEU. For now, you can reach out directly via the Contact link in the footer or the feedback button above.