Remarkable achievements have been made in the study of lexis in general Chinese, such as lexical meanings, word structures, lexical systems, and semantic evolution. However, these studies can hardly reflect the unique characteristics of Chinese for special purposes, such as legal Chinese, travel Chinese, and business Chinese. Taking the commonly used word 管理 guǎnlǐ ‘manage; management’ as an example, this paper explores the characteristics of legislative Chinese in terms of semantic categories and saliency of collocations by comparing them in a legislative Chinese corpus and the BCC corpus. This study finds that 管理 guǎnlǐ ‘manage; management’ is mainly used as a modifier and a modified term in legislative Chinese. The collocated words cover less semantic categories compared to general Chinese. Most of the collocated words are nouns, whose semantic categories mainly come from the political, social and economic fields. The study of the usage of commonly used words in legislative Chinese can not only help to explore the characteristics of legislative Chinese itself and its differences compared with general Chinese, but also provide references for law revision, legal lexicography, and legal Chinese teaching.