Graphical Bills: Bill tracking at a glance

Why do bill tracking and legislative history research have to be so convoluted?

A single piece of legislation might have a half-dozen (or more) bill versions. It might also have more than 100 Congressional Record documents, reports, presidential messages, and other legislative history documents—and not all related to the same bill version. Even online, you might spend hours trying to wrap your mind around the latest legislation.

West's new alternative: We draw you a picture.

Graphical Bills is the recently released legislative research tool that shows the evolution of a federal bill in a user-friendly diagram. This diagram contains icons for each of the bill versions, as well as icons for each legislative history document type and for individual documents. Lines lead your eye from a bill version to a type of document related to that bill version, and then to the individual documents within a document type.

You don't waste time searching databases or determining where in the process a specific document was created. Graphical Bills is ideal for monitoring proposed legislation on issues that may affect clients, as well as for legislative history research.

To view a document in the diagram, just click (or double-click) the icon. For a link to the last document created, click Last Action in the left frame. You can even use the filtering feature to hide the legislative history document types you're not interested in. For added convenience, you can drag your pointer to move the graphical display.

To access Graphical Bills, click Graphical Bills, when available, on the Links tab of a bill. To view a list of the bill versions and legislative history in text view, click Text Version of Graphical View at the top of the Graphical Bills display.

Graphical Bills is also available on Westlaw Compliance Advisor. Coverage of Graphical Bills, both on Westlaw and Westlaw Compliance Advisor, begins with January 2009.

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