Generating the NI Notice of Amendments

A Notice of Amendments is published at the end of each day containing any amendments tabled that day.

How to generate a Notice of Amendments

Fields to input for Notice of Amendments

From the Amendment Manager, select Amendment Actions > Create Official List (or from the Official Lists tab, click on the Create List button)
Select Notice of Amendments and update the relevant information in the dialog box and click on Create
In the Editor, the Notice of Amendments will appear containing all relevant amendments sorted and grouped

How to update the footer with list number

If there is more than one Notice of Amendments produced at any amending stage, the amendment list number displayed in the footer of the list will need updating.

Select Document Information in the right-hand panel
Update the List Number field
Wait for the spinner to finish
Save your changes
Generate a PDF as normal and the footer information will have been updated.

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 - see Publishing NI amendment lists (on Lawmaker and NI Assembly website)

Process and logic for auto-generating the Notice of Amendments

Filtering which amendments to include in the list

Amendments will appear in the Notice of Amendments if—

they were recorded as having been “tabled” up to the specified cut-off date (and time if supplied), and
they haven’t already been published on another list (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 so that all amendments tabled at the same time by a particular proposer will appear together in the Notice.
Lawmaker uses the ‘Submitted’ date/time to determine sort order.
The groups of amendments are sorted by whoever submitted their amendments to the Bill Office earliest - the proposer to submit their amendments first will appear first in the Notice.
This can mean that if a proposer submitted another batch of amendments after their first batch, and after another proposer had submitted their amendments, this new batch of amendments would not be grouped with the first set of tabled amendments by the same proposer.

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.
As automatic sorting in Lawmaker is limited to page and line information gleaned from the amendment, you might sometimes need to add sort codes when there are 2 or more amendments with the same location 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 Regenerating/populating a list with amendments for more information on how this feature works.

Amendments to amendments

If you have any amendments to amendments (a2a) in your Notice of Amendments check whether you need to update the location information in the ‘Amendment Information’ right-hand panel see NI amendments to amendments .

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:

Two or more amendments have the same clause/schedule, page and line number and at least one amendment doesn't have a sort code;
Two or more amendments have the same clause/schedule, page and line number and at least 2 amendments have the same sort code; and
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 NI amendments to amendments )

To fix the red highlighting, you will need to update the location information for each of the highlighted amendments - see NI amendments to amendments and Managing amendment information .

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.