The Ever-Shifting Terrain of US Legislation

Municipal, regional and federal legislation is ever-changing, and difficult to continuously stay on top of.

In one moment, you’re up-to-date on the latest legislative updates that impact your support and guidance provided to your clients. You might even feel this way right now -- that you and your team's knowledge is perfectly up-to-date in your area of expertise.

But, the legal and regulatory landscape is constantly uprooted by newly published legislative updates, altering the entire playing field in your practice area. Detecting these updates, and then incorporating them into your research and expertise, is crucial in order to provide your client or legal team the best possible support on the topic.

Hopefully, you’re lucky enough to have noticed the change before a client, or an important stakeholder, informs you of something you should have already been aware of.

Detecting the latest legal changes is also crucial in terms of assisting your firm in strategically targeting new potential clients, and tailoring communication channels to nurture ongoing client relationships.

But this kind of continuous knowledge and staying-in-the-know requires more than just working your network. It's more than paying a legal information broker, or attending a seminar. What if your client or team needs you to keep track of specific legislative information, in a very particular or nuanced area of legal practice, that's subject to change at any given point?

Enter Visualping.

Leverage Visualping to Keep Pace with Legislative Changes

Get Right to the Source, for the Exact Info You need

Visualping is a thrifty and clever solution for helping legal professionals stay on top of the latest legislative changes they need, from any particular web source they’d like to monitor.

For example, if it’s changes related to federal law you’re after, then use Visualping to monitor any web pages from Congress.gov, including the Congressional Record, congress debates and the full text of US bills by bill number or title.

If it's the official online version of federal public laws, then track any web pages from Govinfo.

Or, track updates to any state-specific pages, including any of the following:

• Official US State and Territory government websites

• Cornell LII's Listing by Jurisdiction

• Nexis Uni to monitor changes to state statutes, codes and regulations.

You don’t have to curb your research with the limited reach of a legal database. Nor do you have to manually look up your various sources, tediously double-checking that nothing's changed since the last time you checked.

By allowing you to monitor primary information sources, Visualping is an easily accessible tool for staying up to date with all of that valuable legal information that lives in a specific corner of the internet -- that only you, as a professional specialized on the topic, know to bookmark and monitor.

How Visualping Works

Simple Website Change Monitoring

Most of the updates legal professionals need to track for their clients and team can be found on the internet, buried in the deep pages of websites belonging to regulatory agencies, government agencies, courts, and every other sort of authority.

But, while the internet is rich with information, it's tricky to keep up with -- especially when it comes to the ever-shifting legal and regulatory industry.

“Website change monitoring” describes a category of tools that scan the web for changes, and notify you when there’s a change. When this happens, you get an email alert that displays the change to you.

Available online, Visualping is particularly useful for legal and regulation monitoring, because you can:

• Only monitor exactly what you care about, by tracking any private or public web page on the internet you want, including PDFs. You can also specify which parts of the page to monitor, and how often you want them checked for changes.

• Easily understand the legislative change, thanks to email alerts with the changes highlighted.

• Stay organized and review past changes for insights in your user dashboard – the central location that collects and stores all the web page updates you’re tracking.

As an added bonus, Visualping offers a keyword alert feature, so you can only get alerted when certain words or phrases are added or removed. This helps ensure that you get notifications for exactly what you care about -- rather than get notified every time an irrelevant legislative change occurs.

How to Sign Up with Visualping: Step-by-Step Instructions

• Step 1. Go to Visualping's homepage, and copy and paste the page URL you want to track into the search bar.

• Step 2. Select the part of the page you want to monitor.

• Step 3. Choose how often you want Visualping to check the page for changes.

• Step 4. Enter the email address you want to use to receive updates to legislative changes.

• Step 5. Check your email for the prompt to make a password -- this completes the signup process.

Step 1: Copy and Paste the Page URL You Want to Track into the Search Bar on Visualping’s Homepage

To begin, simply go to Visualping's homepage, and copy and paste the URL from the web source you want into the search engine.

Step 2: Select the Part of the Page You Want to Monitor

Next, select the specific area of the page that’ll update with the legislative changes you care about. Or, you can just monitor the whole page for changes – it’s up to you.

Step 3: Choose How Often You Want Visualping to Check the Page for Changes

To set how often Visualping checks the page, select your frequency of checks. Depending on the urgency of your subject matter, Visualping can check a page anywhere from every 5 minutes, to once a month.

Step 4: Enter the Email Address You Want to Use to Receive Legislative Updates

Visualping needs an email address to send alerts to.

You can easily change it later from your Visualping account page, but you need to enter an email address at this point in the sign up process, in order to activate your account.

You’re almost done!

Step 5: Check Your Email, Make a Password, and You’re Done

Once you’ve entered your email, you’ll get a message in your inbox from Visualping asking you to set your password.

Don’t forget to do this part – your account won’t be activated, and you won’t get any legislative change alerts!

After you’ve completed these steps, you can easily view all of your tracked pages in a single place, in your user dashboard.

Legislative Changes are Endless, but Manageable – With Visualping

Every regulatory environment is continuously evolving. Especially in today’s most highly-regulated industries, staying one step ahead of requirements is one the legal profession’s biggest hurdles.

With a little know-how, you can use the power of the vast internet to more easily stay in the know on the exact legislative updates you need.

With the help of website change monitoring, keeping pace with the constant change is more manageable than it seems – regardless of how specific or niche your practice area.