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How this is built, and where it stops

LawSignals scores every bill in a corpus spanning all US state legislatures, the District of Columbia and Congress against a written scope for each practice area. Scopes are model-drafted and validated by measurement, not attorney-reviewed. Coverage is real but uneven, and the table below reports exactly where.

Corpus as last built: 273,896 bills across 56 jurisdictions.

How a bill is selected

A tracker is a written description of a set of legal duties, and every bill in the corpus is measured against it. Four steps, in order.

A written scope

Each tracker carries a topic profile describing the duties and mechanisms it covers: what the obligation is, who it binds, and what triggers it. A bill matches on the duty it creates, which is why an insurance bill and a hiring bill can land in the same tracker.

Every bill is scored, not a top slice

The whole corpus is scored against every tracker profile, and the cut is an absolute threshold on that score. There is no per-state candidate limit, because a fixed depth against legislatures that differ seventeen-fold in size makes relevance a function of corpus size rather than of how much relevant legislation exists.

A classifier removes near misses

A bill scoring well against one tracker but better against another is demoted. "Close to cybersecurity, but closer still to data privacy" is a judgement a single similarity score cannot express.

Ranking is how far a bill travelled

Feeds and issues are ordered by how far a bill has actually moved: enacted, then passed both chambers, then one, then reported out of committee, then everything still sitting. A bill introduced last week with a striking title is interesting. A bill that quietly cleared its second chamber is the one a client needs to hear about.

Sources

Built on primary sources

Every bill on this site links to the legislature's own page for it. If a status here disagrees with the legislature, the legislature is right and we want to know.

Where the data comes from

The state legislatures and Congress directly. Full bill text is fetched from each legislature's own published documents, and where a legislature asks bulk consumers to use an archive rather than its web application, the archive is what we read. Federal legislative material is a public record.

Who wrote the scopes

Scope is defined by a written topic profile that every bill is measured against. The profiles are drafted by a model and validated by retrieval measurement against a judged set of bills, not reviewed by an attorney. LawSignals is a research tool and does not provide legal advice.

What is deliberately out of scope

State administrative codes, permanently. Regulatory Watch reads the Federal Register and nothing else. Patents and copyright sit outside the intellectual property tracker because they are federal: the entire state corpus holds two patent bills and five copyright bills, which is the measurement that set that scope.

Coverage

Where there is data today, and where there is not

The corpus spans every state legislature, DC and Congress, but coverage within them is not uniform: legislatures differ in how much machine-readable text they publish. This is the current position per practice area, generated from the same index that decides which pages on this site exist, so it cannot flatter the product.

A jurisdiction with nothing matched is absent rather than listed as zero, and has no page. Counts move as legislatures publish.

Changelog

What changed, and when

Data changes are product changes here, so they are recorded in public. Every entry names something specific that moved.

  1. 18 August 2026

    The whole back catalogue was rebuilt, and the corrections it carried are gone

    Every published issue was regenerated from the corrected record, so the correction notices fifty of them had carried since 12 August are gone.

  2. 18 August 2026

    Every issue now says who published it

    Issues now open with a masthead and close with a line naming the tracker, so the PDF a client is forwarded no longer arrives anonymous.

  3. 18 August 2026

    Regulatory Watch now has a register behind every issue

    September 2025 through April 2026 of the Federal Register was read and classified, around 20,000 documents, so no issue now says federal coverage is unavailable.

  4. 18 August 2026

    A report could cite a rule published after it

    Federal documents are now bounded by the issue’s own month, so a September 2025 issue can no longer open with a rule published in May 2026.

  5. 12 August 2026

    Every published issue now carries a correction where the status changed

    Each of the fifty published issues gained a dated correction naming the bills whose status the record now shows differently, added when the issue is served rather than by editing the stored document.

  6. 11 August 2026

    Bills signed by a governor no longer read “Dead”

    A failure now ends a bill only when nothing afterwards carries it further, correcting 28,198 bills across all 51 jurisdictions, 1,530 of which read Dead while carrying a governor’s signature.

  7. 11 August 2026

    Committee referrals read from the whole action

    Every label on an action is now read rather than only the first, correcting 23,133 bills that were sitting in committee while listed as merely introduced, and 1,872 that had passed a chamber.

  8. 11 August 2026

    Regulatory Watch leads with open comment windows

    The section now opens with comment windows still open when the issue publishes, then rules taking effect, then the month’s publications, so a May rule closing in September appears in September where it is useful.

  9. 11 August 2026

    Executive orders are now read

    The Federal Register publishes no summary for Presidential Documents, so the text of the roughly 25 executive orders a month is now read directly rather than left unclassified.

  10. 11 August 2026

    Cannabis tracker added

    A sixth practice area covering licensing, intoxicating hemp, testing and labelling, social equity, impaired driving and banking access, and the largest tracker by matched volume.

  11. 11 August 2026

    Scoring now accounts for bill length

    Scores are now adjusted for bill length, which had let a 60-section bill reach the threshold at fourteen times the rate of a one-section bill, raising precision across the six trackers from 0.656 to 0.786 on a judged sample with no tracker getting worse.

  12. 11 August 2026

    Intellectual property scope corrected

    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, removing all seventeen Illinois income-tax bills it had been matching.

  13. 9 August 2026

    Report archive opened

    Every issue past its quarter gate is now listed and linked in one place, instead of existing at a URL nobody could find.

  14. 6 August 2026

    Corpus extended to 51 jurisdictions

    All remaining state legislatures were imported, taking the corpus to every state, the District of Columbia and Congress, at a depth that still varies by state.

  15. 5 August 2026

    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.

  16. 5 August 2026

    Effective date calendar

    An absolute effective date stated in an enacted bill’s own text is now extracted and reported, agreeing with the Texas Legislature’s published lists on 789 of 789.

  17. 5 August 2026

    Texas bill text imported

    Texas held 12,788 bills with no text at all, every one matched on its title alone, and text read from the Legislature’s bulk archive now covers 98.8% of them.

  18. 5 August 2026

    Regulatory Watch

    Federal rulemaking on each tracker’s subject, read from the Federal Register, led by open comment deadlines and classified document by document rather than by similarity score.

  19. 5 August 2026

    News matching removed

    The layer matching news articles to practice areas was withdrawn from every surface, because it rested on headline-only analysis with nothing corroborating it.

The changelog has its own page

Frequently asked questions

How does LawSignals decide a bill belongs to a practice area?

Each tracker carries a written topic profile describing the duties and mechanisms in scope. Every bill in the corpus is scored against that profile, and a classifier then demotes bills that sit closer to a different tracker. A bill arrives because of the obligation it creates.

Are the tracker scopes written or reviewed by a lawyer?

No. They are drafted by a model and validated by retrieval measurement against a judged set of bills. That is a real and reproducible standard, and it is not attorney review. Nothing in the product should be read as legal advice.

Where does the bill data come from?

The state legislatures themselves and Congress. Full bill text is fetched from each legislature’s own published documents, and federal legislative material is a public record. Every bill on the site links back to the legislature’s own page for it.

Is coverage the same in every state?

No, and the coverage table on this page reports exactly where it is not. The corpus spans every state legislature, DC and Congress, but some legislatures publish far less machine-readable text than others. A jurisdiction with nothing matched in a tracker is absent from it rather than shown as zero.

Does LawSignals cover regulations?

Federal rulemaking only, through Regulatory Watch, which reads the Federal Register and leads with open comment deadlines. State administrative codes are permanently out of scope and are not on the roadmap.

When does a monthly issue become free to read?

Once the calendar quarter containing its period has ended. A quarter rather than a rolling window, so the answer is the same for every reader and no issue flickers into visibility mid-afternoon. The open back catalogue is in the report archive.

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LawSignals is a research tool. It is not a law firm, it does not provide legal advice, and using it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Always consult qualified legal counsel before acting on anything here.