The article discusses the key issues in the development of the legal monitoring institute in the Russian Federation. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by scientific and practical interest in the problem of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of legal regulation, the quality of regulatory legal acts. Studies of the legal monitoring institute is a relatively new direction in legal science, the objective necessity of which is due to modern challenges in the development of Russian legal system. The absence of a federal legal framework, uniform approaches to terminology in this area significantly hamper the development of this legal institution, give rise to unreasonable variability of regional legal regulation, difficulties in the field of practical activities for monitoring law enforcement. The purpose of the study is to determine further directions of its development based on the analysis of scientific sources describing various aspects of legal monitoring, federal and regional regulatory legal acts. The methodological apparatus is selected taking into account the purposes and objectives of the study. The methodological basis is formed by a complex of general scientific, special scientific and special legal research methods: dialectical approach, systematic, logical methods, formal legal, comparative legal and other methods of scientific cognition. The authors come to conclusions about the need to adopt a federal law, through which unified approaches to organizing and implementing the legal monitoring will be formed, its legal basis will be unified. The types and the structure of legal monitoring need to be clarified, which may include such elements as monitoring of draft regulatory legal acts, monitoring of existing regulatory legal acts, monitoring of law enforcement. It is necessary to expand the subject composition of legal monitoring by including, in addition to authorities, civil society institutions, representatives of the legal community, science, independent experts and other subjects. A system of general legal and special principles of legal monitoring has been proposed to become statutory in the federal law, which can become a guideline determining the content and directions for the development of this institution at all levels of its implementation.