What sources does Lex use?

Lex uses public EU records: EUR-Lex legal texts and metadata, European Parliament procedure and open-data records, the EU Transparency Register, European Commission meeting disclosures, European Parliament MEP meeting declarations and MEP Declarations of Financial Interests where relevant.

Does a disclosed meeting mean influence?

No. A disclosed meeting means a contact was recorded by an EU institution or MEP. Lex reports counts, dates, participants, topics and source links; it does not infer influence, causation or a policy position from a meeting disclosure.

How are lobbying meetings matched to EU laws or sectors?

Lex uses the disclosed subject or topic text and precise curated matching terms for each act or sector, then links each displayed row to its official source. Thin or uncertain matches are not published as facts.

How is the State of EU Lobbying report generated?

A monthly cron recomputes aggregate statistics from disclosed Commission and Parliament meeting records, stores a frozen dated edition, and serves the standing report from the latest cached row.

Lex grounds public pages in official EU records and treats disclosed meetings as disclosure counts only: a meeting record shows that contact was disclosed, not that influence occurred or that anyone took a position.

Methodology

Lex is built for citations, not vibes. Public pages should make it clear what the source says, what Lex matched, and where the official record can be checked.

Primary sources

Matching discipline

Law pages use official CELEX records, procedure references and European Parliament summaries where available. Sector pages match curated sector phrases against official EU legislation titles and publish only pages backed by a real source record.

Lobbying pages count distinct disclosed meetings. Organisation pages use the Transparency Register identifier as the citation anchor. Act and topic pages match the disclosed meeting subject or topic to curated terms, then keep the official meeting source beside the row.

Where the source data is incomplete, Lex says so. It does not fill gaps with generated facts, inferred positions or claims about private influence.

Disclosed meeting ≠ influence

A meeting disclosure is a transparency record: a date, participant, topic and source link. It is useful evidence that contact happened, but it is not evidence that the meeting changed a law, that the organisation supported or opposed a file, or that an official adopted a position.

State of EU Lobbying reports

The public State of EU Lobbying report is a monthly aggregate over disclosed Commission meetings, Parliament MEP meeting declarations and Transparency Register organisation categories.

The counting unit for meeting totals is a distinct disclosed event. Commission rows are deduped by date, official and topic; Parliament rows are deduped by date, MEP and subject. The industry-versus-NGO split counts organisation-meeting participations because the category belongs to the organisation, not the event.

Each monthly cron run writes a frozen dated edition. The standing report serves the latest cached edition; dated URLs preserve the figures published for that month.

Reuse and licensing

EU legal and institutional data is reused under the applicable European Union reuse notices, including Commission Decision 2011/833/EU for EU documents. Source pages remain the authoritative record.