TrackersReportsPricingSecurity
Sign InBrowse all trackersStart Free Trial

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: 270,034 bills across 55 jurisdictions.

How a bill is selected

The short version: a tracker is a written description of a set of legal duties, and every bill is measured against it. There is no keyword list to maintain and none to fall out of date.

A written scope, not a keyword list

Each tracker carries a topic profile describing the duties and mechanisms it covers. Almost no bill regulating artificial intelligence contains the phrase; it regulates an automated decision system, a covered algorithm, a synthetic performer. A keyword list is a snapshot of last session’s drafting convention, and it fails quietly, because it keeps returning results while it stops catching things.

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

State legislatures and Congress directly, plus the Open States public-domain dataset. 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. Coverage within them is not uniform: legislatures differ in how much machine-readable text they publish, and processing is still catching up in some. Rather than claim a flat fifty-state number, this is the current position, per practice area, generated from the same index that decides which pages on this site exist.

A jurisdiction with no matched bills in a tracker is absent from that tracker 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

    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.

  2. 18 August 2026

    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.

  3. 18 August 2026

    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.

  4. 18 August 2026

    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.

  5. 12 August 2026

    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.

  6. 11 August 2026

    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.

  7. 11 August 2026

    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.

  8. 11 August 2026

    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.

  9. 11 August 2026

    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.

  10. 11 August 2026

    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.

  11. 11 August 2026

    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.

  12. 11 August 2026

    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.

  13. 9 August 2026

    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.

  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. Coverage depth still varies by state, which is what the table above reports.

  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

    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.

  17. 5 August 2026

    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.

  18. 5 August 2026

    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.

  19. 5 August 2026

    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.

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 rather than against a keyword list, and a classifier then demotes bills that sit closer to a different tracker. A bill arrives because of the obligation it creates, not because its title happened to contain a search term.

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?

Primary sources: the state legislatures themselves and Congress, plus the Open States public-domain dataset. Federal legislative material is a public record and Open States data is dedicated to the public domain. Full bill text is fetched from each legislature’s own published documents.

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 how much of each has been processed varies, and some legislatures publish far less machine-readable text than others. A jurisdiction with no matched bills in a tracker is absent from that tracker 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.

Read a full issueBrowse all trackers

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.