Introducing Bill: get notified when a law your case relies on is about to change
Most lawyers find out a law changed the same way: a colleague mentions it, a client asks, or the amended text is already in force and the argument you were about to make no longer works.
The proposals that catch you out are rarely the ones you set an alert for. They are the ones you never knew existed. An article your case rests on is working its way toward amendment, and nothing has told you, because you did not know to look.
Legislative monitoring usually starts after you already know which bill you are watching. Bill starts earlier, from the other end: it begins with the articles already in your files and works back to the proposals that would change them.
The case file becomes the query
When you work a matter in Mino and upload your briefs, contracts, or pleadings, Mino’s document intelligence reads them. It extracts the laws and articles your case rests on and resolves them to canonical identifiers: BW boek 6 artikel 185, Awb 8:69, Rv 843a. The specific provisions, not just the act.
Bill maintains an affected-articles index. For every proposal it tracks, it records which existing articles that proposal would change. It is a map from bills to the specific legislative text they touch.
Mino matches the articles in your case file against that index. When there is a hit, a message surfaces on the case file: “An article relevant to this matter may change. See the proposal here.”
You did not subscribe to anything, and you may never have heard of this bill. The match is anchored to the exact article in the exact document on your desk.
Mino already does this for case law: Nina surfaces relevant rulings as they appear. Bill does the same for legislation. Both run in the background.
What you find when you click
The alert points to a bill you did not know existed. You click through.
What lands in front of you is Bill’s bill page: a plain-language overview of what the proposal actually does, where it sits in the parliamentary process, the affected-articles index showing exactly which provisions it would change, and links to the source documents.
It is built to be shared. You can send it to a client to explain what is at stake, or to a partner who needs to understand the exposure. It does not assume you have been following the proposal from the start. It assumes you just found out about it and need to get up to speed.
For bills you already know about
If you already know a bill exists, you can search for it in Bill and follow it manually. Bill will notify you by email when its status changes, when a new document is published, or when a new version of the legal text is tabled. About 640 Dutch and EU proposals are in the catalogue now, with more added as they are introduced.
This is the part most monitoring tools already do, and it works. It is not the part that needed building.
Why this only works inside a platform
A standalone monitoring tool can tell you a bill moved. Only a connected one can tell you a bill that matters to this case moved.
Mino is built around specialist agents that each do one job on the same case file. Thea surfaces the facts. Garry builds the argument. Bill watches the legislation. They share one data layer, so Bill already knows which articles appear in which documents in which matters. It does not guess which proposals might be relevant. It matches them against what is already there.
A standalone tracker can tell you parliament was busy. It cannot tell you the activity touches the specific article in the specific brief you filed last month. That difference is the whole product.
Getting started
Bill is available now as part of Mino. If you are already working in Mino, the matching is active. There is nothing to configure.
Maurits Fornier is co-founder of Mino and founder of Patroon Legal Design. He spent five years as a litigator at Freshfields and ten years in legal design and technology. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
