The paper constitutes an attempt to apply methods used in linguistics and in terminology studies based on jurisprudence in order to compare specialist vocabulary from the field of Polish and German labour law. The presentation is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part contains a brief description of the bilateral and unilateral methods used in contrastive linguistics, and subsequently presents methods of legal comparative studies applicable to terminology studies as well as relations observable between lexemes of general and specialist language. The empirical part discusses selected terms of Polish and German labour law which were a subject of a comparative analysis conducted with the help of the methods described in the theoretical part. The paper ends with a summary and conclusions stemming from the analysis.