Legal 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.”

   

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.

You can tag and update cross-references to provisions with legal number format as you can with other number formats - see References .

Note that the smart paste feature doesn’t currently fully support legal number format. If, therefore, you copy for example court rules from another source, eg: Word or legislation.gov.uk, Lawmaker will insert any characters in the number after the first full stop as text into the paragraph. You can work around this by simply deleting the additional characters and adjusting the number as necessary.