Thomson Reuters releases tool for understanding proposed federal legislation

Thomson Reuters is introducing Legislative Insights, a new tool on Westlaw Edge that provides actionable data relating to proposed federal legislation.

Westlaw Edge users will now be able to take advantage of the comprehensive legislative content from Thomson Reuters and technology from Skopos Labs to present a complete picture and provide counsel relating to proposed legislative changes that may affect a client, company, agency or an entire industry.

“Legal professionals want to exhibit a deep level of understanding of their clients’ businesses and operations,” said Lisa Mulrooney, director of Product Development at Thomson Reuters. “Legislative Insights on Westlaw Edge enables users to deliver greater value through deeper insights and strengthen their trusted partnership with their clients.”

Driven by a proprietary machine learning and natural language processing methodology from Skopos Labs, Legislative Insights uses more than 250 factors to assign a Probability of Enactment score to each bill. Additionally, a tag is generated for relevant industries that will likely be impacted if the bill is passed.

The algorithm weighs multiple factors, including the text of a bill as well as political and external variables.

A text example could show an environmental bill would be more or less likely to pass with the terms “climate change” included compared to a bill where “global warming” is used.

Political variables could range from the composition of Congress to the assigned committee. External factors incorporated may be related to gross domestic product or natural disasters.

Thomson Reuters was an early investor in Skopos Labs through Thomson Reuters Ventures, its venture capital group that focuses on growing and mentoring early stage startups.

The Skopos Labs team consists of AI researchers, attorneys, data scientists, software engineers, and policy experts, building solutions ranging from legislation, regulation and election-level insights. 

For more information about this release, visit https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/.