New Historical Consolidations in LawOne

Monday 21 November 2016 @ 10.33 a.m.

LawOne Historical Consolidations have had a facelift and LawOne customers will notice new historical consolidations being updated daily across the Northern Territory.

Background to the Project

TimeBase is consistently working on updating historical consolidations across all jurisdictions in our LawOne platform, enabling all historical consolidations to be accessed through the newly developed tab in the "View All Details" page for each piece of legislation.

To begin with, we are currently updating all NT historical consolidations online and you should see consolidations back to 2004 start to appear in the interface over the next few weeks.

We will then move onto ACT, TAS, VIC, QLD and SA before developing new methods for NSW and CTH.

So is this Point-in-Time then?

At TimeBase, we believe there is a distinct difference between historical consolidations and our unique Point-in-Time services. 

Traditionally, many legislation users including lawyers, business people, Members of Parliament and government employees have prepared their own unofficial paste-ups of consolidated Acts in order to track the changes to the law. This is a difficult and labour intensive task involving the manual search of indexes and tracking of amending legislation through the Table of Amendments or other gazette references, followed by the physical assembly of text representing the current state of the law. The likelihood of error increases each time an amendment is applied, while the readability of the document is significantly reduced.

This is an important factor when talking about legislation which is point-in-time as it means that rather than needing to work out which version of the legislation contains the amendments you are looking to see (as most historical consolidation providers claim), TimeBase Point-in-Time simply allows you to enter a date in the pre-defined range of the service and the entire service displays as if you were looking at all the legislation at that point in time.

Unlike Historical consolidations, our Point-in-Time documents are living documents, not static consolidations, meaning you can link to date sensitive information at any level – part, chapter, section or whole legislation – and this information is always being updated and added to each time a new Bill passes through Parliament or a new case goes through the courts.

The granularity of our consolidation process also means that each section could have a completely different scope date in the legislation and you would only be shown a snapshot of all these sections as they exists at the exact point in time that you have picked.

If you would like to access either our new historical consolidations or our unique Point-in-Time documents and you are not already a subscriber to LawOne or our unique Point-in-Time Services then please contact us to find out more or to take a free trial