Training Module: Preparing the Minutes of Proceedings

📘 Introduction

Generating the NI Minutes of Proceedings

📚 Exercises

🛠️ Getting started

Before you can complete this exercise you should complete Training Module: Preparing the Annotated Marshalled List as this will provide you with the bill, amendments and amendment outcomes you need to prepare a Minutes of Proceedings.

✏️ Exercise 1: Generate the Minutes of Proceedings at Consideration Stage

Once the outcomes have been assigned to the amendments on the Marshalled List (to create the Annotated Marshalled List), you are ready to generate a Minutes of Proceedings. Most of it is auto-populated, but the list is editable in case you need to make small tweaks or add additional paragraphs.

Generating the Minutes of Proceedings

Step 1: Generate the Minutes of Proceedings

Generate the Minutes of Proceedings, selecting Consideration Stage.

Detailed steps to generate the Minutes of Proceedings

From the Amendment Manager, select Amendment Actions > Create Official List
On the create amendment list dialog box, select Minutes of Proceedings at Consideration Stage giving it a unique name e.g. MoP - CS
The Minutes of Proceedings will appear in a new tab in the Editor, containing all auto-populated text.

Step 2: Insert additional paragraphs

Test out inserting extra paragraphs into the list of outcomes

Detailed steps to insert additional paragraphs

Place your cursor in the paragraph before where you want to insert an extra paragraph
Click Enter and select Paragraph
Type into the empty Text placeholder element

Step 3: Share with Business team

Once you are ready to share with the Business team, you will need to save the PDF and open it in Word.

How to share with Business team

Save the PDF in an appropriate place
Open MS Word
Open the Minutes of Proceedings document by browsing to the folder where you saved the PDF
The PDF will open in a Word document (you can further annotate the document in Word if preferred).

✏️ Exercise 2: Generate the Minutes of Proceedings at Further Consideration Stage

You can generate a Further Consideration stage Minutes of Proceedings to see how it differs from the Consideration stage version.

Generate a Minutes of Proceedings at Further Consideration Stage

From the Amendment Manager, select Amendment Actions > Create Official List
On the create amendment list dialog box, select Minutes of Proceedings at Further Consideration Stage, giving it a unique name e.g. MoP - FCS
The Minutes of Proceedings will appear in a new tab in the Editor, containing all auto-populated text.

The Further Consideration Stage Minutes of Proceedings will not include the 'Clause/Schedule/Long Title Stand Part outcomes

The FCS Minutes of Proceedings we created in this exercise includes a stand part motion, but that’s only because we included one in the training data. Ignore this one.

Export to Word

You cannot export a Minutes of Proceedings to Word in Lawmaker. This is because it’s easy to save the PDF and open the PDF in word which will do the exact same thing without development effort. Because the document is so simple structurally, opening it in Word causes no issues to the formatting or content.

☑️ When complete…

Move onto Training Module: Preparing the 'as amended' version of the bill