Legislative Tracking Tool: Monitor Any State and Federal Legislation

The nonstop tide of changing legislation can be overwhelming for legal professionals.

Whether you’re tracking bills, hearings and debate, new regulations or judicial updates, automatically keep your knowledge up-to-date with this legislative tracker.

The pace, volume and nuance of change is staggering in the legal and regulatory industry. One moment, you’re up to date on the latest laws and regulations in your focus area. But, in the next, new interpretations of bills, amended regulatory requirements or court precedents uproot everything you thought you knew.

Hopefully, you’re already aware of the changes before a client mentions it to you – rather than getting caught off guard, and having them catch on to the fact you didn’t know.

Finding the right legislative tracking tool to stay on top of changing legislation and regulations is crucial to ensure you’re supporting your clients with the latest, most up-to-date knowledge.

Take the finance industry, for example. The average number of yearly global regulatory changes is 56,000. Most of these updates can be found on the internet, on websites belonging to regulatory bodies, government agencies, courts and every other sort of authority.

But, while the internet is rich with this continuously evolving information, it’s also tricky to keep up with.

Of course, you’re already doing lots to stay current in your practice area. Your firm likely pays for expensive databases that promise to notify you of important changes. Maybe you’ve joined a professional association that hosts seminars, courses and educational events. You likely discuss with colleagues the latest developments.

But staying up-to-date on every legal and regulatory update you need to know – especially the specific, niche pieces of information – requires more than just working your network, and relying on databases that, ultimately, are limited in the legal and regulatory content they provide. What are you to do when your client or team requires you to keep up with the latest in a very specific industry area, or application of legal practice?

Even more, what if you’re required to know about these updates as soon as they occur online? Manually rechecking a web page, or a database, several times a day is tedious, time-consuming and ineffective. And, often, databases are slow to publish updates – they’re not as real-time as you would prefer.

That’s why adding a real-time legislative tracking tool that enables you to monitor any web pages online is crucial to your research strategy. It saves you a lot of time, and makes it easier to support your team and clients with the best, latest knowledge.

The Legislative Tracking Tool to Monitor Any Legal and Regulatory Changes in Real-Time

Thankfully, this article covers a few thrifty and clever solutions that help you stay automatically up-to-date when legal and regulatory changes occur, rather than forcing you to seek updates through the grapevine, consult expensive software, or attend a seminar.

The first among these techniques is a legislative and regulatory tracking tool that allows you to get notified, in real-time, of the exact changes you need – from any web sources on the internet.

Visualping

Visualping is a website change monitoring tool that’s commonly used for legislative tracking.

“Website change monitoring” describes a category of tools that scan the web pages you tell them to, and the exact area of the web page you want to track for changes, so you only get notified of the exact updates you care about.

When it detects the update, you receive an email alert, notifying you of the change. The alert includes a screenshot of the page, with the changes highlighted, so they’re easy to see and understand.

Visualping is the leading website change monitoring tool. 98% of AM Law 100 use the legislative tracking tool, as well as the world’s top 25 global law firms. It’s a simple and cost-effective way to keep your knowledge current in the legal and regulatory industry.

Want to get notified of legislative changes?

Sign up with Visualping for a legislation tracking tool that monitors any web page online for the exact legislative and regulatory updates you need.

Stay on Top of the Specifics, Wherever They Are Online

Visualping allows you to track any web pages you want, from anywhere on the internet. You can set the legislative tracking tool to monitor any specific information on legislative websites.

You can use it for bill tracking, and to get updates on hearings and debate, for example. You can use the legislative tracking tool to stay on top of information from any hard-to-find web sources – that only you know to check. You can even get notified of changes to PDFs.

With a little know-how, you can use the power of the internet – and simple automated monitoring – to stay on top of the exact developments that matter to you and your team.

Automatically Keep Your Knowledge Up-to-Date

Instead of manually refreshing pages for updates that may or may not occur at that time, legislative tracking tools, like Visualping do the work for you. It’s a huge time saver, and guarantees you’ll be aware of the update once it happens.

How Does it Work?

Just go to Visualping’s homepage, and enter the web page you want to track. Select the page area you want to get notified about, then set how frequently you want Visualping to check for changes, and the tool will check the page on your behalf. Enter the email address you want the alerts to be sent to, and that’s it.

Visualping also offers real-time monitoring options, so you can get notified of a change within five minutes of it occurring online. Keeping pace with urgent and time-sensitive changes doesn’t have to involve laboriously rechecking websites several times a day.

What are Some of the Most Common Pages Monitored By Visualping?

Here are some examples of the most common pages monitored by legal knowledge professionals with Visualping. No matter your legal practice area, there is surely a page or two (or perhaps a few dozen) that you could monitor to stay in the know:

Legislative Updates

Regulatory Updates

Judicial Updates

By allowing you to monitor any primary information sources, Visualping is a legislative tracking tool that’s an accessible alternative for staying on top of exactly what you need, from anywhere on the internet.

Customize Your Monitoring for Filtered, Intelligent Alerts

As well as monitoring any web pages on the internet, you can select certain areas of a web page to track, so you only get notified of what you care about. You also choose whether to monitor visual changes or textual page changes, so your notifications are just right.

As an added bonus, Visualping offers a keyword alert feature, so you can only get a notification when certain words, phrases or numbers are added or removed from a given page or page area.

If monitoring web pages for changes is starting to sound a little technical, Visualping also offers its Business users a dedicated support team. They’ll actually take care of setting up and managing the pages you want to track, so you can just focus on getting to work.

For more information on how Visualping can support your legal and regulatory monitoring efforts, contact Visualping’s team – they’d be happy to help.

Additional Legislative Tracking Methods

Hundreds of millions of people log on to social media every day. But beyond mainstream memes and the latest hashtags, social media is also a powerful tool for staying on top of regulatory changes.

Most regulatory agencies, for example, actively post and maintain a social media account. They use social media to share information about their activities, and important policy updates.

If you’re already scrolling through social media feeds on a regular basis, following these pages is an easy way to stay on top of regulatory changes.

To start you off, below is a list of some agency accounts you may want to follow:

USDA: Twitter
DOT: Twitter
OSHA: Twitter
EPA: Twitter | other active accounts
FDA: Twitter

Another good source of Twitter accounts with regulatory news and updates is the JD Supra family of accounts. Whatever your niche, seek out the experts on Twitter!

After following these accounts, be sure to click the “notify” button on specific pages you really care about. That way, whenever they make a new post, you’ll get a special alert. Allow Twitter to send you notifications on your phone, and you’ve got regulatory alerts streaming straight to your phone.

2. Newsletters, Blogs and RSS Feeds

Blogs and feeds are still a good source of regulatory intelligence. Just as you might seek out the agencies and experts on Twitter, see what is offered by these folks on their own websites — you might be surprised! For example, some regulatory agencies publish their own journals, newsletters and blogs, such as OSHA Quicktakes. As well as briefing you on important industry trends, many of these resources include important legislative changes and regulatory news.

Of course, many legal experts also post their perspectives and opinions on their blogs. Check out Justia or the Lexblog open archive for two exhaustive lists.

Once you’ve identified all the sites you want to follow, you have a few options for staying up to date with their postings. Your chosen approach will depend on whether you want to get alerts in your email inbox, or in a separate location.

If you’re fine with getting updates in your inbox, simply look for a newsletter sign-up option on the blog. If one isn’t offered, Visualping (mentioned above) can fill in and provide you with email updates when any blogroll is updated.

If you’d rather not add clutter to your email, RSS feeds are a super handy way to stay up to date with blogs. I suggest using Feedly to subscribe to any number of feeds. In cases where an RSS feed isn’t available, try a service like Kill the Newsletter. Otherwise, Visualping can generate an RSS feed for any page you monitor with the service.

Whatever your approach, signing up for these resources is another great way to keep regulatory updates coming your way. You’ll know when there’s a new regulation, whether it concerns you, and its requirements. With some strong curation, regularly glancing through a stack of subject lines in your inbox or your Feedly will help you stay attuned to valuable information that you might not have known to look for.

Final Thoughts: Legislative Tracking Can Seem like a Lot, but Not with the Right Combination of Tools

The legal and regulatory environment continuously evolves. Especially in today’s most highly-regulated industries, staying one step ahead of legislative updates, bills, amended regulations, court precedents and anything else is one of the legal profession’s most demanding hurdles.

With the help of these legislative tracking strategies, legal professionals can more easily keep up with the updates that require their attention.

And, with Visualping, you can stay on top of the exact legal and regulatory changes that require your attention, from anywhere on the web, in real-time.

Contact their sales team for more information on how the tool can supplement your research today.

Legislative Tracking Tool: Monitor Any State and Federal Legislation

The nonstop tide of changing legislation can be overwhelming for legal professionals.

Whether you’re tracking bills, hearings and debate, new regulations or judicial updates, automatically keep your knowledge up-to-date with this legislative tracker.