New Bills are entered first thing each morning and briefly summarised in what are called Bill Profiles. These, too, are done as first priority each day and issued to clients - before lunch if urgent. A weekly reference document, Update, is produced during session and this has a convenient format showing Bills introduced in Parliament, with tables showing their progress and includes a profile of every important Bill. 2. Another innovation is the Documentation Acquisition List which deals with the enormous number of Policy Documents acquired by LEGI-LINK , as well as the usual speeches by Ministers and deputy ministers on subjects such as their budget votes. These documents come from many different sources and LEGI-LINK has organised them by title and date references into a database.
Clients get lists of the titles of new documents fortnightly and can then request the full text.
An exciting new development in Parliament is the growing importance of committees. They are then ready for distribution next day. These report are much more comprehensive than those appearing in the press and more immediate, as well as more selective, than Hansard which typically takes eight weeks to publish. Networking Another important aspect of legislation monitoring is networking. This oils the wheels and gets results when people need help with specific requests.