Nielsen examines how online legal dictionaries can be improved drawing on experience gained in an on-going lexicographical project at the Department of Business Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark, which combines two monolingual and two bilingual dictionaries for the language pair Danish and English in a tool containing a database, search engine and online dictionary. This dictionary takes account of the specific functions of dictionaries (communicative and cognitive) and matches them with the needs of users. This approach caters for both the encoding and decoding needs of users. A variety of search options including ‘help to understand a term’, ‘help to find a term when the meaning is known’, ‘help to translate a term’, ‘help to translate a collocation or a phrase’ allow for a final multi-functional product that escapes the constraints of traditional paper dictionaries.