Changelog
What changed, and when
Data changes are product changes here, so they are recorded in public. Every entry names something specific that moved, including the corrections. A changelog that only ever reports improvements is not a record of anything.
Last updated 18 August 2026
The whole back catalogue was rebuilt, and the corrections it carried are gone
Fifty of the fifty-one published issues had been showing a dated correction since 12 August, because a published issue was treated as a record that could be annotated but never rebuilt. That was the right call while people were reading them; it is the wrong call for a catalogue nobody has subscribed to yet. Every issue has now been regenerated from the corrected record, so the statuses on the page are the statuses, and the correction notices have been removed rather than left standing over documents that no longer need them.
Every issue now says who published it
The report carried no LawSignals name anywhere a reader could see: no masthead, no footer, nothing but a line in the page source. It now opens with a masthead and closes with a line naming the tracker and linking to it. That matters most for the PDF, because the PDF is the copy that gets forwarded to a client, and it used to arrive anonymous.
Regulatory Watch now has a register behind every issue
The Federal Register corpus started in May 2026, so every issue before that said federal coverage was unavailable, which was honest and unhelpful. September 2025 through April 2026 has now been read and classified, around 20,000 documents, so each issue either lists the federal rulemaking that touched its topic or states how many documents were checked and found nothing. One month is genuinely thin: October 2025 published 584 documents against a normal 2,300, because of the federal shutdown, and the issue says so rather than implying a quiet month.
A report could cite a rule published after it
Two of the three ways a federal document could be pulled into an issue had no upper date bound, so a September 2025 issue opened with a rule published in May 2026. Every issue now contains only what existed when its month closed.
Every published issue now carries a correction where the status changed
Correcting 28,198 bill statuses did not change a single already-published report, and that is deliberate: a published issue is the record of what was sent, and rebuilding “June 2026” in August produces a different June. So each of the fifty published issues now carries a dated correction at the top, naming the bills it shows as Dead or Vetoed that the record now shows as signed, enacted or still moving, and counting those shown at an earlier stage. The stored document is never edited; the correction is added when the issue is served, so it reaches anyone opening a link they were sent months ago. The PDF carries it too, which matters because the PDF is the copy that gets forwarded.
Bills signed by a governor no longer read “Dead”
A bill’s status was the furthest stage it ever reached, and a failure outranked everything, so one procedural setback anywhere in a bill’s history made it Dead for good. That is common: Rhode Island holds a measure for further study and passes a substitute instead, and Texas records “Point of order withdrawn” during a floor debate the bill goes on to win. 1,530 bills carrying a governor’s signature were labelled Dead. A failure now ends a bill only when nothing afterwards carries it further, and 28,198 bills were corrected across all 51 jurisdictions. Vetoes are included: a bill vetoed and then signed after amendment reads Signed, and one whose veto was overridden reads Enacted.
Committee referrals read from the whole action
One action carries several labels at once, and only the first was read, so “Introduction and first reading, referred to Health Finance” counted as an introduction and stopped there. 23,133 bills sitting in a committee were listed as merely introduced, and 1,872 that had passed a chamber were too.
Regulatory Watch leads with open comment windows
The section used to list the federal documents published during the report month. It now opens with comment windows still open when the issue publishes, then rules taking effect next, then the month’s publications. A proposed rule published in May with comments closing in September appears in the September issue, where it is useful, rather than only in May’s. A deadline that has already passed is stated in the past tense and never leads.
Executive orders are now read
The Federal Register publishes no summary for Presidential Documents, and this layer refuses to classify a document from its title alone. Executive orders were therefore stored and never classified. Their text is now read directly, for the roughly 25 published each month.
Cannabis tracker added
A sixth practice area covering adult-use and medical licensing, intoxicating hemp and cannabinoid products, testing, potency limits and labelling, social equity and expungement, impaired driving, and banking access for licensees. It is the largest tracker by matched volume, and Practice Group now includes all six.
Scoring now accounts for bill length
A bill was scored by its single best-matching passage, which favoured long bills: a bill of 60 or more sections reached the match threshold at fourteen times the rate of a one-section bill. Against a judged sample, bills that long were relevant 4.3% of the time while scoring higher on average than one-section bills, which were relevant 21.3% of the time. Scores are now adjusted for length. Precision across the six trackers rose from 0.656 to 0.786 on that sample and no tracker got worse.
Intellectual property scope corrected
The tracker’s written profile opened on “ownership and control of intangible commercial assets”, which matched seventeen Illinois income-tax bills, including ones on union dues and police overtime, because an Illinois tax amendment carries the whole Income Tax Act as attached text. The profile now names what the tracker protects: a person’s name, voice, image and likeness, an employer’s trade secrets, and marks in trade. All seventeen are gone.
Report archive opened
Every issue past its quarter gate is now listed and linked in one place. Previously each tracker page linked only its newest open issue, so older issues existed at URLs nobody could find.
Corpus extended to 51 jurisdictions
All remaining state legislatures were imported, taking the corpus to every state, the District of Columbia and Congress. Coverage depth still varies by state, which is what the table above reports.
Children’s online safety tracker added
A fifth practice area covering age verification and age assurance, age-appropriate design codes, engagement design on minor accounts, app store accountability and parental consent.
Effective date calendar
Where an enacted bill states an absolute effective date in its own text, that date is extracted and reported. Validated against the Texas Legislature’s own published effective-date lists: 789 of 789 agreed, with no disagreements.
Texas bill text imported
Texas held 12,788 bills with no text at all, so every Texas bill was being matched on its title alone. Text now covers 98.8% of them, read from the Legislature’s bulk archive rather than by crawling pages its robots file disallows.
Regulatory Watch
Federal rulemaking on the same subject as each tracker, read from the Federal Register and led by open comment deadlines. Every document is classified by a model rather than by a similarity score, because a similarity score cannot tell an automated decision system rule from a duty determination on imported pasta.
News matching removed
A layer that matched news articles to practice areas was withdrawn from every surface. It rested on headline-only analysis with nothing to corroborate it, and a legislative intelligence product should not report what the press said as though it were what the legislature did.
How the data is built
Most entries here are corrections, and they are only meaningful against the method that produced them. The methodology page states how bills are selected, where the data comes from, exactly which jurisdictions are covered today, and what is deliberately out of scope.
Read the methodology