Preparing 'as amended' NI bill versions

The high-level process for updating your ‘as amended’ document version

Step 1: Pre-flight checks

Before you publish a bill, always start with a clean bill

Open the Bill in the Editor
Check there are no bad document warnings in the Document Checks right-hand panel
Remove all comments from the Review right-hand panel
Delete any jrefs using Insert > Delete all jrefs

Before applying amendments, always start with a clean set of amendments.

In the Amendment Manager, filter your list of amendments by ‘Made’ and ‘Made on division’
Select the filtered amendments using the checkboxes
Select Amendment Actions > Create temporary list
In the Editor, view the Document Checks right-hand panel to check there are no mandatory warnings that need addressing
Remove any comments from the Review right-hand panel
Save and close your temporary list using the blue Close Editor button

Step 2: Apply amendments & check results

Use auto-apply to apply the made amendments

Amendment Manager showing filtered amendments.png

Amendment Manager showing filtered amendments ready to be applied

From the Amendment Manager, filter your list of amendments by ‘Made’ and ‘Made on division’
Select the filtered amendments using the checkboxes
Select Amendment Actions > Apply Amendments
Select Create a new bill version (visible on the 'Project’ tab) specifying the folder “03 As Amended at [Stage]” and the version description = “As amended at [stage]”

Once a new bill version has been created and the amendments applied, a green success message will appear letting you know how many amendments were successfully applied
The total applied amendments can include amendments that could not be successfully applied e.g. their insertion point overlaps with another amendment
Large bills containing lots of amendments can sometimes take a while to auto-apply (~3 mins)

Review and accept the successfully applied amendments

Auto-applied amendments in the Editor

From the Project tab, find the newly created bill version and open it in the Editor
In the Editor, click on the first amendment in the Inline Amendments right-hand panel to jump to the first amendment applied to your bill
Click on the tick icon on the inline amendment card in the right-hand panel to accept the amendment.
Check whether any printing changes are required and make those directly in your document; and check for any new Document Check or XML warnings in their respective right-hand panels and fix if relevant (invalid cross-reference document check errors can wait until you’ve renumbered and updated cross references as they might resolve themselves at this point).
Select the next amendment in the Inline Amendments right-hand panel to jump to the next amendment applied to your bill.
Continue accepting and applying printing changes for each amendment applied to the bill.

If the bill is a large and performance is negatively affecting your ability to accept changes, close the bill and reopen it using Actions > Edit portion of document
You can use the Accept All Amendments button at the top of Inline Amendments right-hand panel but it will be harder to see which amendments require further printing point changes

Check for any warnings and errors identified when applying the amendments

View the Review right-hand panel for any warnings or errors

Some messages warn you that the amendments were applied but need checking e.g. if there was more than one paragraph being inserted by different amendments in the same place and the amendments didn’t have sort codes to help Lawmaker understand the order to insert them, the warning message is asking you to check the sort order. You can use the structure view to drag & drop provisions into the correct order if necessary.
Some messages are error messages letting you know that a certain amendment couldn’t be applied. In this case, open up the specified amendment in a temporary list and check for any obvious mistakes e.g. page-line information, incorrect punctuation in the instruction text or whitespaces at the end of the instruction if it’s inserting new provisions.

Open the PDF of the published bill to help work out the amendment’s location
In the Amendment Manager, select the amendment(s) that could not be applied and open them in a temporary list,
Display the list side-by-side with your bill (Windows button + left arrow on your keyboard to divide your monitor view in half)
To copy whole provisions from a quoted structure:
In the Editor with the temporary list, place cursor inside the quoted structure of the amendment and select right-click > copy content of quoted structure (this will copy everything within the dotted line of the quoted structure, including any nested quoted structures)
In the Editor with the Bill, place cursor in the location where you would like the copied provisions inserted after and use Ctrl + V to paste the contents.
Remove any locked nums when you do this (with your cursor in the num element right-click > Lock/unlock num)
To copy text from the instruction:
In the Editor with the temporary list, highlight the text to insert from within the single quotes
In the Editor with the Bill, place cursor in the location where you would like the text to appear and use Ctrl + V to paste the contents.

As with auto-apply, check for any printing changes you need to make as a result of the applied amendments and make these changes as you go.

Once you’ve finished manually applying an amendment, delete the warnings as you go so you can keep track of which issues you have resolved.

Step 3: Finalise document

If performance in the Editor isn’t too bad
Update the Document Information from the right-hand panel, clicking on the Update button to access the dialog box
Renumber the whole document (Renumber button in upper tool bar)
Update cross references (Tools > Update references) selecting whole document
Insert the front cover (Insert > Insert Front Cover)
Insert the back cover (Insert >Insert Back Cover) and check whether -rev is needed after EFM
If you have a large bill and performance in the Editor is slow
Close the bill in the Editor, saving your changes and return to the Project tab.
To minimise the number of repeating steps in this process, the recommended sequence is:
Select Actions > Update Document Information and update necessary fields e.g., version rubric and dates
Select Actions > Finalise Document and select what you need from the options e.g., renumber, update x-refs, reinsert front/back covers including table of contents.

Step 4: Final checks

Do some final sanity checks before sending out the ‘as amended’ PDF for checking

Check the statements are correct
Check Document Checks right-hand panel for any warnings. The only issues you should see here are invalid x-refs that Lawmaker was unable to resolve or benign ‘advisory’ document checks such as definitions not being in alphabetical order.
Correct any invalid x-refs (as flagged in the Document Checks right-hand panel) although this is probably OLC’s responsibility if it is an Executive Bill
Check the Table of Contents for the expected number of clauses and schedules
Save changes and close the bill using the Close Editor button

From the Project tab, from the green working version of the final As amended bill version, select Actions > Compare version
Select the final working version of the As Introduced bill version
Override the default version description with something more meaningful and click on Compare
Open the compare version in the Editor and check the changes were made in areas you were expecting them to be

If Executive bill: Share with OLC for checking & update as required.
If it is a Private Member’s Bill that has not been drafted by OLC: checks are done by the Private Member Bill team & updated as required

Generating a PDF might be a quicker way of skimming through the compared document looking for changes (and any missing printing point changes)

Deleting the front cover and the back cover in the Editor for the compare version will help reduce the ‘noise’ from using compare