Generating the NI Notice of Withdrawals

When your amendment list has been checked and is ready for printing/publishing, you need to publish the list in Lawmaker in order for automated processes in the amendment list generation logic to work.

Process and logic for auto-generating the Notice of Withdrawals

Filtering which amendments to include in the list

Amendments will appear in the Notice of Amendments if—

• they have been given the outcome “withdrawn” before the specified cut-off date (and time if supplied),

• they have already been published on a Notice of Amendments, and

• they haven’t already been published on another Notice of Withdrawals. To check if an amendment has been published on another list, open the amendment in a temporary list, place cursor in the amendment, open ‘Amendment status’ in the right-hand panel and click on the link “Manage lifecycle events” which will list all events, including ‘published’ if it has been published. If it was published in error, you can delete this event.)

Grouping the amendments

• Amendments are grouped by proposer.

• Lawmaker uses the ‘Submitted’ date/time to determine sort order of each group (if more than one proposer withdrew their amendments on the same day).

• Whoever submitted their amendments to the Bill Office earliest - their withdrawn amendments will appear first.

Sorting the amendments

• Amendments within each proposer group are sorted by the order they appear in the bill - Clauses 1-n, Schedules 1-n and Long Title amendments appearing last.

• A note will appear before each amendment with the rubric “The following amendment tabled by {Member} on {***}, has now been withdrawn:

• You will need to manually update the Member name and date for each amendment

• You can delete the amendment note if there were lots from the same proposer and it looks repetitive

• If you deleted a note but later decide you want to reinsert one, place your cursor in the amendment, right-click and select ‘Insert amendment note’

Red highlighted amendments

If you have some amendments in the list that are highlighted in red text, they will have triggered one of the following rules:

1. Two or more amendments have the same clause/schedule, page and line number and at least one amendment doesn't have a sort code;

2. Two or more amendments have the same clause/schedule, page and line number and at least 2 amendments have the same sort code; and

3. Two or more amendments do not have a target provision (this can happen for amendments to page & line amendments whose location information hasn’t been manually updated - see https://lawmaker.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USERMANUAL/pages/933232641 )

To fix the red highlighting, you will need to update the location information for each of the highlighted amendments - see https://lawmaker.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USERMANUAL/pages/933232641 and https://lawmaker.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USERMANUAL/pages/25526517 .

Red highlighting will not appear in the PDF - it is only visible in the Editor as a way of drawing your attention to potentially important missing information.

Refreshing the list in the Editor

If an amendment is sorted incorrectly, you can use the structure view to drag & drop it to the correct location. However, you risk this error creeping in again when the Marshalled List is eventually generated.

The best solution would be to update the amendment’s location information in the Amendment Information right-hand panel.

To refresh the list so that the updated amendment is correctly sorted (without having to manually drag & drop the amendment, select Tools > Regenerate List which essentially re-reruns ‘Generate List’ logic and repopulates the list in the Editor without having to delete the list and regenerate it again.

See https://lawmaker.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USERMANUAL/pages/25526698 for more information on how this feature works.

If you do regenerate the list, another italic note will be inserted which will need deleting by selecting it from the breadcrumb and deleting it.