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Background & Introduction

Legal numbering was made available to Lawmaker with the release of version 15.0 in August 2023. It was developed for Court Rules, but is available in all types of SI\SSIs and Bills, across jurisdictions.

To use legal numbering, create a new SI/SSI as normal and insert your first provision.

Change to Legal Numbering

Click on your first number and update the number to the correct format ie: 1.1.

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Next, Lock the number by, one of the following actions:

• Right-clicking on the number and selecting Lock/Unlock Number

• Press Alt L

• From the Tools menu, select Lock/Unlock Number

More information on locking can be found here - Locking and unlocking numbers

Then continue with your SI/Bill as normal. Lawmaker will create the right numbering structure, and also renumber using the right structure.

NoteThere is currently a bug, if you copy court rules numbering By “legal numbering” we mean numbers that consist of two or more numeric components separated by a full stop, e.g. 1.2, 3.5, 13.2A. We’ve called it legal numbering because it is a style of numbering commonly used in legal documents. In legislation, legal numbering is most commonly used in court rules but also sometimes appears in EU legislation.

Lawmaker supports the legal numbering style for SI regulations and articles and schedule paragraphs. It can also be used for Bill sections.

The numbering for these provisions by default continues to be the standard style (e.g. 1., 2., 3. etc. or 1, 2, 3 etc.) but you can manually change the numbering to the legal numbering style and Lawmaker will respect that when renumbering or adding new provisions.

How to use legal numbering in a document

1. Change the first rule/regulation/section number from “1.” or “1” to the legal number format, e.g. “1.1.”

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2. Right-click on the number and select Lock/Unlock Number. This will stop the number being changed when you renumber the document. (See Locking and unlocking numbers.)

3. If you insert new provisions after the first provision they will automatically be numbered in sequence, e..g “1.2.”, “1.3.” etc.

4. If you renumber all the provisions in your document, they will be be renumbered following the legal number format.

5. If your document has divisions such as Parts and you want the numbers in each Part to correspond to the Part number then you should manually set the number of the first provision and lock it as described in step 2 above. For example, in Part 2, change the first provision number to “2.1.” and lock the number. If you do that, inserting new provisions and renumbering will work correctly.