The European Union institutions are increasingly present in the lives of European citizens, particularly through legislation. A vast store of text types in all the official EU languages are available for investigation, and since the EU institutions wish to dialogue with citizens, research into the language of these documents would be socially relevant. The overview presented here briefly considers the nature of these texts, the type of corpus-based research that has been accomplished or is underway, and hypothesizes about future applications of corpus-based research on EU documents. One example of corpus-based research is the EuroParl corpus, a parallel corpusof parliamentary proceedings in 11 official languages, others are multilingual text mining and information extraction, and linguistic analysis of legal texts via a publicly available corpus: the JRC-Acquis multilingual parallel corpus. Within the field of English, research into EU discourse has been conducted with both pedagogical and descriptive aims. Specific EU lexis has been identified, as well as work on typical phraseology, particularly in English and French. If evidence-based comparative research were conducted into, for example, document design, clarity, and comprehensibility, by comparing them to comparable specialized corpora, the workings of the EU in its multifarious areas of influence might become clearer to citizens, which would be mutually beneficial.