Generating the Notice of Amendments

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 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.

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. You may also need to other amendments immediately before and after it if the reason for incorrect sorting is because they all share the same page-line information.

In the Editor—

1. Place cursor in the amendment to amendment

2. View ‘Amendment Information’ in the right-hand panel

3. update the Sort Code to define which sort order the amendments should appear in e.g. “1” for the first and “2” for the next.

Once you have updated the amendments' location information, you can either refresh the list (Tools > Update List) or use the structure view to drag the amendment(s) to their correct location.