The article provides a contrastive analysis of 54 multiword terms of the EU legal acts in the Lithuanian and French languages and discusses the principles of multiword term formation in the investigated languages. Firstly, the theoretical principles of the analysis (conception of a term and the phenomenon of valency) are defined. Secondly, the main syntactic structures of the analysed multiword terms are presented indicating the head of the phrase, the types of its dependants and their government structure. Afterwards, the semantic and grammatical peculiarities of the noun-dependants and the adjective-dependants are discussed. The analysis reveals structural similarities and differences of the multiword terms of the EU legal acts in Lithuanian and French and provides insights on multiword term formation in the investigated languages. The results of the analysis are believed to be valuable both for term developers and translators, as well as users and learners of legal Lithuanian and French.