What's new in version 19?

Version 19 is a significant release which extends Lawmaker to support Bills and Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly. It also contains some new features and improvements for existing users.

It was released on 9 April 2025.

Northern Ireland Bills and Acts

Users can create NI Bill projects in the same way as UK and Scottish Bill projects. The templates, available elements and PDFs that Lawmaker generates match the existing format of NI legislation.

Within NI Bill projects, users can draft amendments and NI Assembly users can generate amendment lists, the groupings and the Speakers' Brief.

See Northern Ireland bills and amendments

Editor

Smart paste

The smart paste function has been enhanced to correctly handle pasting of content in SI/SSI schedules (previously it only worked correctly for schedules in Scottish and UK Bills).

See Smart paste.

Tag references

The Tag References feature has been improved, specifically to handle the type of references generally found in SI/SSI footnotes.

When you tag a provision, the content of any footnote associated with the provision will now also be tagged.

In addition to existing reference forms, the tagging process will identify “short form” references that consist of only the year and number, for example: 2006 c. 4, 2006 asp 4, 2006 No. 4, S.I. 2006/4, S.S.I. 2006/4.

(Some types of references found in footnotes may still not be recognised but this should be improved in a future release.)

See References.

Document check improvements

A number of improvements have been made to Document checks. These include fixes to existing checks and new rules:

• A new rule has been added to identify straight single quote marks/apostrophes in titles and provide a quickfix to transform them into curly.

• We have adjusted the rule that checks for missing end quotes on Quoted Structures so that it isn’t triggered unnecessarily when using adjacent quoted structures. Additionally, we have provided a new rule which checks for ‘following text’ elements which appear between adjacent quoted structures, and flags these where it appears they aren’t necessary. The new rule provides a quickfix to remove the ‘following text’ element.

• We have made a small change to the rule which compares the target of internal references with the text of those references, to support the format of some of the internal references which appear in the Table of Origins.

Auto-applying amendments

Lawmaker v.19 upgrades the auto-application feature for amendment to tables. Users can now apply amendments which insert, substitute, or leave out one or more rows inside a table in a bill.

A small change has also been made to the auto-apply notification which appears after the auto-apply process is complete. This notification will now remain on-screen until it is closed, rather than disappearing after a few seconds.

See Applying Amendments

Inline amendments

It’s now possible to use an Inline LoDA to create amendments which add a new cross-heading, Chapter, or Part somewhere in the bill.

See Inline amendments

Amendment management

Lawmaker v.19 adds a new option to the Amendment Actions menu in the Amendment Manager to allow parliamentary users to Table/lodge selected amendments without opening them in a list:

Scottish scripted marshalled list

A new CCA option labelled "Page Break" allows users to insert a page break between amendments and script boxes as required.

See Inserting page breaks .

Origins and Destinations

Lawmaker v.19 includes additional beta functionality to support the drafting and management of consolidation bills, including automatic generation of the Tables of Origins and Destinations which accompany those bills. It is now possible to--

• create a consolidation Bill project (UK Bill, Scottish Bill, NI Bill or Church Measure) with a template which includes a placeholder table of abbreviations and Table of Origins attachment;

• add entries to the table of abbreviations at the beginning of the Table of Origins;

• automatically tag external references in the table of abbreviations and in any Origin notes added to the body of the bill;

• generate a Table of Origins which lists all the relevant origin information for all provisions in the bill;

• generate a Table of Destinations attachment containing multiple tables (one table for each enactment referenced in the table of abbreviations) which list the provisions of the consolidation bill next to the specific enactments they are re-stating.

PDF generation - line numbering

From v.19, Lawmaker users in a parliamentary organisation will have the ‘line numbering’ option enabled by default when generating a PDF of a Bill. This option will remain disabled by default for users in other organisations.

See Generating and viewing a PDF .

SI subject, number, title and date blocks

The subject, number, title and dates blocks at the beginning of an SI are now further locked in the main Editor window to prevent accidental changes or deletions.

You can still update the subject or dates by clicking on them and selecting the appropriate options in the dialog box. The title and number can still be updated via the Document Information panel on the right.

See Managing Subject, Extent and Subsubject , Managing Dates , Managing document information .

Bug fixes

User management

Editor

PDF

References

Amendments