This paper introduces the EUR-Lex Retrieval Dataset (EUR-LexRD): an evaluation benchmark for long-form similar case retrieval based on the case law handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The EUR-LexRD contains 20,697 English CJEU judgments published between 1954 and 2025. All cases are enriched with metadata and a case summary and have been segmented into six sections (e.g., legal context, facts, and reasoning). Each judgment also details outgoing citations to other European Case Law Identifiers.

The evaluation set features 100 query cases and a seeded candidate pool created with seven different retrieval strategies. The resulting benchmark consists of 12,365 query-candidate pairs, which were human-annotated by nine legal experts on a four-tiered relevance scale in order to establish a high-quality gold standard. The dataset’s features, namely the long document length and section segmentation, present new hurdles for retrieval and reranker models.

The EUR-LexRD is intended as a resource to advance the field of legal information retrieval by (i) making it possible to compare lexical, dense, hybrid and long-document retrieval strategies and (ii) supporting the fine-tuning of existing encoder or reranker models. The EUR-LexRD is released under a CC BY 4.0 license.