Legislative monitoring and search for legislative material

Every year, the dynamics of legal changes is forcing an increasing interest in regulations that are not only not yet in force, but have not even been adopted.

To the past, there are times when a lawyer could advise the client fairly, based only on the legal state in force. More and more often, advice must go forward, taking into account the legal situation that can only occur in the future. This is strongly reflected in advice for economic operators, especially those active in regulated industries. For them, legal changes can mean rapid business inhibition or, on the contrary, they can allow for growth, expansion into new markets and access to new customers.

To prepare for upcoming legal changes, you often cannot wait for legislation to be passed. By adapting business to new regulations still in the legislative phase, many months can now be gained over those who know about legal changes only from the Journal of Laws.

All these phenomena have been further intensified in the last few months. Due to the pandemic, the regulations of great importance have been adopted at an express pace, leaving the addressees little time to adapt to the new regulations.

At the summit of the pandemic, the drafts of the new acts appeared at the last moment only to become applicable law. However, following the legislative process gave a huge information advantage.

Analysis of pandemic projects adopted during its first The wave showed that the average time since the appearance first Official mention of the project until its entry into force 18 days for laws and 10 days for regulations and their average vacatio legis, respectively, only 0.76 and 1.11 day.

Strength 103 Regulations entered into force in less time than 24 hours from first references to them, including 49 on the day of publication[1].

So those who waited to comply with the new regulations until they were passed were deprived 90% the time he could have for this purpose by examining the proposed changes and aligning them with his organisation.

All these phenomena now affect the expectations of lawyers by their clients. More and less often, they consider the answer to questions addressed to them and the dry assessment of whether the planned projects are not banned or subject to excessive legal risk.

The cooperation of a lawyer-advisor with a client is becoming more and more popular, and together they form a plan to deal with new regulations. This is a plan in which a lawyer must play a key role. However, he will not be able to do so unless he is actively seeking information on the forthcoming legal changes.

How do we get information?

Information on ongoing legislative work is distributed between the websites of all institutions involved. In order to track them without using additional tools, you have to periodically, preferably every day, analyze the contents of each of them, check whether any changes have taken place in the projects of interest to us and whether new projects containing important solutions have appeared.

Some of the necessary information can be found in the legal information systems (SIP). However, both LEX and Legalis only share information about draft laws adopted in the Sejm, which has already been given a print number. They therefore basically ignore both draft regulations and the entire government legislative process. Most of the information on legislative activity can be found on Vigilex[2]. It collects In one place all the most important information about each project, including:

• • all available versions of the project text,
• • links to available versions of justifications and OSR,
• • a list of amended acts indicating the amending provisions,
• • the planned deadline for adoption by the Government,
• • planned vacatio legis,
• • the body and persons responsible for the design of the project,
• • links to project information on government and parliamentary websites,
• • complete schedule of project work.

All this information is available free of charge without the need to buy a subscription. Registration in the service is only necessary to use the search engine for projects.

Legislative monitoring can be carried out using various tools. The comments and advice set out in this chapter are designed to help address the problems of monitoring and the search for legislative material, regardless of what solutions are intended to help achieve this objective.

They will therefore be useful both for those who want to directly use public sources and those who seek information already partially developed and orderly in SIP or Vigilex.

In each of these cases, knowledge of the origin of the information accompanying the documents and the institutional environment of the actions taken is a condition for a proper assessment of the state of work on the project and further prospects for its adoption.

The sources of information will be discussed separately for the different stages of the project, indicating how to effectively look for information on:

• • assumptions for planned projects,
• • projects undertaken at the government stage, • projects and laws undertaken at the parliamentary stage,
• • acts published in the Official Journal.

Preliminary information on planned projects

Before the full text of the project is published, the government often publishes basic information on it. These include most of the following:

• • the reason and the need for adoption,
• • the substance of the planned solutions,
• • the planned deadline for the adoption of the draft,
• • stage of work, or
• • an indication of the responsible persons.

They shall be included in the relevant lists of legislative work:

• • Act – in the List of Legislative and Programme Proceedings of the Council of Ministers made available online at the BIP Chancellery of the Prime Minister of the Council of Ministers 3 ,
• • Regulations of the Council of Ministers – on the same list,
• • Regulations of the Prime Minister – in the List of Legislative Works of the Prime Minister 4 ,
• • Regulations of individual ministers – in the lists kept by each of them.

All ministries must keep lists of legislative work in accordance with the Lobbying Act; however, not everyone does so as fairly. Some ministries actually document their plans online, but some are limited to occasionally combining a document with the current state of the plan once or several times a year.

Government legislative process

Projects developed in the Council of Ministers and by central authorities should be made available at the BIP of the Government Legislative Centre on the website of the Government Legislative Process[5]. In normal cases, that's where you can find it. first versions of the project.

However, the rule had already been abandoned several times under the pretext of the so-called "pre-consultation" – instead of the RCL website, the project went to the news one from the resorts. Projects were also posted on the RCL website with a significant delay.

If these were laws – they first appeared in the Sejm, and if regulations – in the Journal of Laws.

Each project in RCL is dedicated to an individual subpage. We will find all the documents collected at the various stages of the government legislative process. The launch of each stage is initiated by a new version of the draft, justification and impact assessment (OSR). More than one a version of those documents.

one the version will, for example, precede the consultation and second will take account of some of the comments submitted by re-assessment. On each document, we will find the date of its inclusion in the system indicated as the ‘date of creation’.

Contrary to the name, however, it is not the date of the document itself – we can only know this one after opening the file. These dates usually vary by several to several days.

In principle, at each stage the text, justification and OSR should be separated from other documents in the section entitled ‘Project’. The other sections include e.g. letters referring the draft to the arrangements or consultations, views at the stage or documents referring to the comments submitted.

However, sometimes the new text of the project will go to the wrong line, or the material collected at a given stage will not be divided into sections. It is worth keeping this in mind, following the progress of developing further versions of the project.

Before the project reaches the Sejm, it must be accepted by the Council of Ministers – either at a meeting or in a circular mode. The plans of the individual meetings are usually published one day in advance on the Chancellery of the Prime Minister's website on the subpage of the ‘Council of Ministers' agenda’ 6 , information on approved projects shall be included in the ‘government decisions’ section as appropriate. 7 .

Projects in the Sejm and the Senate

Knowledge of projects other than government before they reach the Marshal of the Sejm is much more limited. It is most accurately gathered on the Senate website, where In one we can find all the projects developed by Senators, and everyone is dedicated to a separate subpage[8].

It is much harder to find information on the projects developed by Members. If they are available at all, they need to be looked for in transcripts from the meetings of the various parliamentary committees and committees.

When the projects reach the Marshal of the Sejm you can look for information about them in two places:

• • in the tab “Progress of the legislative process” where there are projects that have already been given a print number[9] and
• • in the ‘Projects brought to the Sejm’ tab, where there are projects waiting for printing and referral to first reading[10].

The projects to which the number will be given are removed from here. From that point on, all information about them should be found in the appropriate prints. However, some of the projects (particularly initiated by opposition parties) will never receive a print number, remaining there until the end of their term of office. Hence, the term “freezer” adheres to it.

After receiving the print number, the project goes to its own subpage, along with information on the progress of the works and links to all associated printouts.

In the Sejm, the work schedule is included in a total three or four Version:

• • submitted to the Sejm with a justification for the project,
• • adopted by the committee during the second reading,
• • adopted by the Sejm and transferred to the Senate,
• • after consideration of the amendments to the Senate, if any.

Information on what happened to the project between these points must be reconstructed on the basis of minutes and transcripts of meetings. However, it should be borne in mind that the Internet does not receive a set of information available to the participants of the committee meetings and, in particular, the content of all the amendments tabled is not made available. Those which will be rejected by Members often leave a mark only in the form of a number in the order of vote.

On the Sejm website there are also reported effects of works in the Senate. The Senate resolution receives its seismic printing and is included in the project work schedule. However, this information is published late, so it is worth, regardless of the Sejm, to follow the Senate website. After the bill goes to the Upper Chamber, it is placed in the “legislative process in the Senate” tab. 11 and receives a dedicated subpage on which the work schedule and the content of the resolutions adopted are published.

The situation is similar with the President's signature. The Sejm publishes information that the bill was signed and then published. However, this usually happens only a few days after these events. Information on signed laws is better sought directly on the head of state website[12].

Declared normative acts

However, we can look for announced normative acts in two public sources:

• • in the Internet Legal Acts System (ISAP) 13 and
• • on the official website of the Journal of Laws[14].

The information contained in ISAP is richer in metadata. They include, inter alia, a reference to the draft on the Sejm website, a list of the proposed acts, or the date of application of the act. In principle, only the text of the act, the item in the publication and the date of publication are published on the Journal of Acts.

ISAP, however, has one The key flaw. It is completed late in relation to the Journal, sometimes even several days, which, for example, in the case of regulations entering into force the day after the announcement, is disqualifying for this source.

If we want to keep up with news, we must use the Journal of Laws or applications based on the information available there (LEX, Legalis, Vigilex).

How to select projects?

In order to find in the thick of the planned legal changes those that may affect the business of the law firm or its clients, one must answer the question of what criteria may decide. Most often these will be:

• • titles of amended and repealed laws or regulations,
• • the numbers of the amended provisions,
• • legal basis,
• • reference to specific groups of entities, phenomena or institutions,
• • government administration department,
• • Ministry of the Applicant.

first three the criteria are formal, fourth – language two last – conventional. This division translates into their sharpness. Appropriate selection of criteria first The group allows for a flawless distinction of changes relevant for the selected industry or specialization of the firm.

The amendments thus encouraged may also include less significant changes to the rules, but based on formal criteria, we are able to identify a group of projects that should at least be reviewed and evaluated. Language criteria are most demanding.

They are based on full text search in the proposed regulations, justification and project descriptions. Their use requires far-reaching precision to limit the contexts of certain expressions to those relevant to the monitoring legislative area.

For example one the keys used to monitor projects dealing with compliance may be ‘corruption/corruption’. On its own, however, such a key will catch all projects concerning so-called uniform pensions, as they apply to CBA officers. To avoid this, we need to apply additional filtering criteria – but not every tool will allow us to do this.

Conventional criteria cause the most trouble. The selection of projects due to the ministry of the applicant rarely coincides with the area of interest of any industry or specialist law firm. Theoretically, narrowing the selection to selected government departments can help. We can do this, for example, in the RCL search engine. However, this choice is neither exhaustive, Or reliable. It is based on an arbitrary and forced choice that does not reflect the complexity of the thematic changes.

How, without looking into the project, is it making changes to a specific law? In many cases this is impossible without using SIP or Vigilex. It is known that the title of the project itself tells us little about the catalogue of novelized acts. Often, the most important thing in the project hides behind the phrase "and other laws".

The projects published on the RCL website are sometimes accompanied by a list of amended acts. However, this is not a rule, and the list of proposed laws is not easily available. We need to look for it in the metadata of the projects the search engine uses. We can find them in the website of each draft change register.

It contains the item “The attribute of the bill/resolutions proposed has been changed to:” – that is where there is a list of amended laws or regulations (although the regulations are not listed in the attribute name) and “The attribute of the bill/resistently repealed in:” where we will find a list of repealed normative acts.

Unfortunately, the Sejm website does not offer similar functionality. However, it is possible to find this information for projects at the parliamentary stage in SIP:

• • in LEX, available in the ‘Related Documents’ menu in the ‘modified acts’ and ‘repeated acts’ boxes,
• • in Legalis, as ‘designed changes’ and ‘designed repeals’.

Even by combining these sources, however, we do not get a comprehensive picture of the ongoing work, mainly due to shortcomings in the RCL database. Only a small part of the projects have a supplemented attribute "laws /revisible amendments" or "laws /objectives". This means that we will not find the others, using even the advanced search engine in the Government Legislative Process service.

The most complete information on projects that amend the selected normative act, regardless of where it is at, is available on Vigilex. This application collects all available versions of draft laws and regulations, reads them and classifys all provisions, creating lists of amended acts. After entering the title of the selected act, we will receive a list of projects. In each of them, the application will colour the changes relating to a given law or regulation.

On similar rules, Vigilex collects data on the legal basis of draft regulations. This allows us to easily find all projects based on a specific rule or bill. Vigilex makes it possible to use formal selection criteria to the most extent possible.

Its search engines may also select projects on the basis of the numbers assigned to them in the lists of legislative, seismic and senate works, applicants, responsible persons and on the basis of full text criteria relating to both the content of the proposed legislation and the descriptions drawn up in the subsequent stages of the legislative work.

The material collected in Vigilex also includes those versions of the projects which were included in the RCL and the Sejm only in the form of scans – graphics without text layer. Such documents shall be subject to optical text recognition (OCR) to be available in the search results and at the selection stage for thematic modules.

Regardless of the criterion used, we receive information from all stages of the project.

The same criteria are used in Vigilex to build monitoring modules: sets of projects covering selected industries or areas of specialisation. Each of these modules shall be based on a set of keys relating to both the titles of the proposed acts, the legal bases, descriptions and the content of the provisions.

The keys are selected in such a way that, on one hand, cover all potentially interesting projects, with second and minimise the risk of project monitoring outside the selected field. Moreover, users of the application are left with a final choice whether they want to maintain monitoring of selected projects or prefer to opt out.

This allows modules to adapt dynamically to their needs.

How Can I Keep Up to Date?

Independent monitoring of government and parliamentary services is a challenge for everyone who wants to be sure that he has a set of information on legislative work in the areas of interest to him. In order to manually check the progress of the work in the range chosen by you, you would have to visit as many as a few dozen pages and subpages every day in the governmental and parliamentary services described above. It is also not easy to detect changes that have occurred recently:

• • in the lists of legislative work on the NRPM website, it is necessary to check individual sub-pages of each project. Each of them contains a record of changes which allows to trace the chronology of work on the project,
• • In the RCL, you can order the projects according to the criterion of the last change to see if among the recent changes were the ones we want to monitor,
• • In the Sejm and the Senate, it is also necessary to check whether new events on the timeline have appeared on the websites of our projects,
• • Government decisions are chronologically structured,
• • on the Journal of Laws website we can organize acts by date of issue and publication, but we cannot use the date of entry into force criterion. We have it in ISAP, but we must remember that projects are placed there late.

Fortunately, you don't have to check all this manually, side by side. There are several solutions that allow us to make our work much easier by automating some of the identified activities or completely entrusting legislative monitoring to specialized algorithms. We can use this:

• • tools (plugins/applications) to monitor changes on websites,
• • notifications with RCL,
• • the RSS channels of the Sejm,
• • alerts/notices from SIP,
• • Vigilex app.

Website change tracking plugins

Web browsers are the easiest way to automate legislative monitoring on a not-large scale. Several dozen similar tools are currently available. The most popular are Distill 15 , Wachete 16 , ChangeTower 17 , Versionist 18 or Visualping[19]. Each of them offers a free plan in which monitoring of selected sites can be successfully launched.

Once the plugin is running, it will cyclically check whether there have been any changes on the website since the last visit. It can monitor the entire code or selected parts of the page, e.g. a column with a list of projects.

When a new position appears on it we will receive a notification and can compare the condition after and before the change. It is important to highlight the relevant parts of the parties for monitoring.

The monitored block cannot, for example, contain a watch, date or today's names, because we will be informed of changes in this section on every occasion. To this end, most of these tools exclude selected sections from the selection.

Using Distell or similar tools, we can approach the monitoring of legislative changes to two methods:

• • include a list of the latest or recently amended projects,
• • to monitor specific projects.

In addition to tracking notifications, we can review the list of monitored pages, check when recent changes took place and review their history. To choose a tool that best suits our needs, it is worth reviewing the free plans offered within them. They differ in particular:

• • the maximum number of pages followed,
• • maximum frequency of page readings per day,
• • number of archived versions of tracked pages.

It is worth noting that e.g. Distell offers much better conditions as a browser plugin than as a cloud application. Access to the data we follow cannot be easily transmitted between devices, but in return we get the possibility:

• • unlimited tracking of several dozen pages,
• • refresh frequency settings even for a few seconds,
• • grouping of pages by institutions or areas of legislation by means of convenient tags.

We receive such favourable conditions thanks to the fact that the use of the application does not burden the service provider's servers, and all the work related to data collection and opening monitored pages is done by our computer. Nevertheless, it is worth considering paid plans if we want to share knowledge with others in the team, e-mail or text notifications, etc.

The use of applications or plugins monitoring changes on websites leaves us with the task of still working hard enough processing the data obtained. When monitoring shows us the newly added bill, we will have to look into it, download files with the text of the planned regulations, etc. The same will be the case for information about the appearance of a new version of the draft text on the project page. In each of these cases, we have to assess and develop the information indicated by the application ourselves.

In order to receive current information about projects, we can also use the solutions offered by RCL and the Sejm website developers.

RCL notifications

In RCL it will be a notification system available to registered users. We can receive an e-mail when a new project or the progress of the project meets certain criteria. However, the RCL database content is a problem with the criteria used. If we set the title of the amended act as a criterion, for example, we do not have a guarantee that we will actually know about its next amendment. As a result, RCL notifications can be relied on to a very limited extent as they are mostly based on conventional criteria.

RSS channels of the Sejm

Several RSS feeds are available on the Sejm website, including a channel including the information posted in the area entitled "legislative process" 20 . This channel is very useful, unlike the same side of the Sejm, because it contains information structured according to the last change, not according to the print number.

This allows us to follow the latest developments in the legislative process much more effectively. Unfortunately, the RSS feed available on the Sejm website does not give any way to adapt it to its needs.

There are of course RSS readers that allow filtering of collected information, but the information available in the channel (title, applicant) is not enough to build meaningful monitoring criteria.

Notifications/alerts in SIP

The SIP system for informing users about legal changes is very promising. In LEX these are alerts, in Legalis – notifications. They shall enable the selected acts or even provisions to be marked while awaiting information on the changes which concern them.

Unfortunately, the limited amount of information collected in both SIPs is a key limitation of these functionalities. This is not how we can get information about the new project at the time of its consultation, but only when it is published or even when it is about to enter into force.

It is far too late, given the needs of modern dynamics of legal change.

Vigilex — monitoringregulacyjny.pl

The only solution that provides information on legislative progress from first the assumptions in the list until published in the Official Journal of the Laws are Vigilex. From each running monitoring module users receive cyclical reports in which they are collected In one location of information on their projects.

Each user determines the frequency of reports. Most of them are given every day – they include legislative work from the previous day and acts entering into force on the day of receipt of the report. They are collected in six Sections covering:

• • new projects,
• • progress on projects, and
• • new versions of the text,
• • separate for laws and separate for regulations.

Vigilex can also send alerts. They shall inform users of the projects covered by monitoring. They shall arrive within an hour of the time when the project meets the criteria for its inclusion in the thematic module.

This will usually happen when the legislative work on the project begins, but can happen at any stage of the legislative process. If the long-term project meets the monitoring criteria only later – e.g.

as a result of the so-called insert: changes added to the project in an area that it was not supposed to touch before – the user will learn about it from an alert sent by Vigilex.

The application interface and the range of information contained in the Vigilex reports and alerts have been designed to provide users with access to current information on the relevant areas of legislation, allowing them to quickly adjust the catalogue of tracked projects to their needs.

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This text comes from the publication New Technologies in Lawyer's Practice, edited by Patryk Ciurak, Grzegorz Wierczyński, Arche publishing house, Palester Library, 2021