Frequently Asked Questions

What is Legislaide's pilot program?

The Legislaide Pilot Program is a collaborative effort between Legislaide and participating municipalities. The pilot program offers a select number of municipalities access to our full suite of products and services. In exchange, we kindly request participants to provide valuable feedback and insights to help us refine our product and optimize its use cases, ensuring it better suits the unique requirements of different local governments. It's important to note that the quality of the tools available to pilot participants are no different than the product that is available on the market for full price. The only difference is that the pilot version includes integrated feedback modules to collect valuable insights from participant.

Rest assured, we have designed the feedback process to be minimally intrusive and user-friendly, allowing you to express your thoughts with ease. It could be as simple as providing a quick 5-star rating or a thumbs up and down to measure your satisfaction with the outputs.

We actively encourage open communication with our pilot participants to better understand their needs, pain points, and suggestions for improvement. Overall, we are committed to providing exceptional support, training, and assistance to make the pilot program an enriching and productive experience for all involved parties.

Who can participate in the pilot program?

The pilot program is currently open to municipal governments. While Legislaide is available on the market, we are dedicated to expanding and enhancing our services to ensure our platform can effectively meet the needs of and support all types of municipalities. To achieve this goal, we are actively seeking municipalities of different sizes, locations, populations, and backgrounds to ensure a comprehensive understanding of legislative processes across various contexts.

While the pilot program has limited slots, we encourage interested municipalities to visit our website at legislaide.com/pilot to learn more about the program and express their interest.

What is the objective of the pilot program?

The objective of the pilot program is to evaluate the effectiveness of Legislaide's platform and tools in streamlining legislative research and drafting processes; assess its impact on reducing workloads, time, and effort; gather participant feedback for improvements; and identify potential areas for expansion and enhancement ahead of the full-scale launch. By collaborating closely with participants, we aim to identify potential areas where Legislaide's platform can be tailored to provide even more robust support for legislative drafting, document management, and other critical processes.

What services and tools will be available to participants during the pilot program?

Participants in the pilot program will have access to Legislaide's entire suite of products, custom-tailored to their municipality's preferences. As part of the pilot program, users will gain access to the following tools:

Agenda Item Tool: Generate descriptive and structured agenda items, automatically referencing the corresponding resolutions and ordinances you’ve drafted.

Resolution Drafting Tool: Write resolutions that accurately reflect your municipality's decisions and intentions in a fraction of the time.

Ordinance Drafting Tool: Simplify the complex process of drafting ordinances, complete with relevant citations, through a straightforward questionnaire process.

Transform the intricacies of drafting ordinances into a simple questionnaire process, helping municipalities establish well-informed local laws.

Proclamation Drafting Tool: Effortlessly create proclamations and official announcements, allowing local governments to recognize significant events and individuals in the community.

Speaking Point Writer: Generate persuasive and well-researched speaking points with citations for elected representatives, supporting effective communication during meetings and public engagements.

In addition to refining our current tools, we invite pilot participants to envision how our technology can further streamline other drafting processes in their municipalities. As part of our pilot program, we are open to developing new features for your municipality, at no extra cost. For example, our proclamation drafting tool was developed as a direct response to requests from multiple local government officials.

How can participants reach out for support or assistance during the pilot program?

Participants can reach out for support or assistance during the pilot program by contacting us at pilot@legislaide.com. We value direct communication with our pilot users and are committed to providing prompt responses to any queries or issues that may arise.

Additionally, as part of our dedication to ensuring a seamless experience, we offer personalized 1-on-1 support for participating municipalities. Our support team is readily available to address your needs, provide guidance, and offer training to help you make the most of Legislaide's suite of products. We strive to be a reliable partner throughout the pilot program journey, supporting you every step of the way.

Will participants' data and feedback be kept confidential?

Legislaide will uphold strict confidentiality standards and adhere to relevant data protection regulations. Participants' data and feedback will be anonymized and used solely for the purpose of program evaluation and improvement.

Furthermore, all the service providers that our product is built on are SOC-2 compliant. This compliance ensures that strict security measures are in place to safeguard your data from unauthorized access or breaches.

What kind of data does Legislaide collect and store?

Outside of publicly available data, Legislaide may collect and store certain data from participants. This data may include basic personal information provided during the account setup process, such as name, email address, and city location. We may also store user inputs within the platform, ensuring that your preferences and settings are saved for convenient access.

In addition, we collect Usage Data and User Feedback to better understand your experience with our platform and make necessary improvements. This feedback is crucial in refining our product and optimizing its performance to meet your specific needs.

To enhance our services and ensure seamless navigation, we may collect Metadata, which includes various types of information about your interactions with the platform.

Examples of Metadata that we may collect include:

Page Views: Information about the number of times a specific page or feature within the platform is accessed.
Click Data: Data on which buttons, links, or elements users click on while using the platform.
Session Duration: The amount of time a user spends on the platform during a single session.
User Interaction: Data on how users engage with various features, such as which tools they use most frequently or the actions they take within the platform.
Device and Browser Information: Metadata that includes details about the user's device type, operating system, and web browser, which helps optimize the platform's compatibility.
Login/Logout Times: Timestamps that record when a user logs into or out of their account.
Error Logs: Records of any errors or issues encountered by users while using the platform.
Time of Activity: Timestamps of when specific actions are taken by users, such as when a document is created, edited, or deleted.

All data collected and stored during the pilot program is solely intended to improve our services. We do not sell this data to third parties, and any personally identifiable information (PII) will be anonymized to protect your privacy.

What is Legislaide, and how does it work?

Legislaide is a web-based, AI-powered legislation drafting tool designed for municipal governments. It can be used to generate, organize, and even amend legislative text, offering suggestions, corrections, and improvements. Legislaide has been developed to understand user inputs about legislation, whether they are written in formal legal language or informal conversational style.

Our advanced model learns from a vast amount of existing legislative text, including a municipality's city charter, municipal code, and document templates. This unique learning process allows Legislaide to grasp the specificities of your municipality and understand how words and phrases typically appear in its legislative context. This in-depth knowledge enables Legislaide to predict the next most likely word or phrase that should appear in a piece of legislation based on the user's inputs, similar to the auto-complete function on your smartphone or search engine.

For instance, during the model's training process, we might ask the model to complete a legislative sentence such as: "The enforcement of the animal breeding regulations will be the responsibility of ___." As it reads and learns from countless lines of legislative text, including your city's codes and charters, it gains a better understanding of this type of sentence and can predict the next phrase more accurately.

Because there are many possible phrases that could follow (e.g., "The enforcement of the animal breeding regulations will be the responsibility of "the Animal Control Officer," "the local police department," or "the Department of Health Services"), there is an element of randomness in the model's responses. However, this provides users with a range of appropriate responses, allowing them to choose the one that best fits their specific legislative context. This flexible approach also enables Legislaide to adapt to amendments and changes in legislation, making it a versatile tool in the legislative process.

In addition to this, our classifiers learn to categorize data according to predetermined categories, including legislation topic, document type, jurisdiction, and other relevant legislative parameters. This enables Legislaide to process and interpret a broad range of legislative text, ensuring more accurate and contextually appropriate drafting suggestions.

What type of information is used to train Legislaide?

Legislaide is developed using (1) information that is publicly available on the internet and (2) information that our users or human trainers provide. This answer focuses on the first set: information that is publicly available on the internet.

This set includes things like state and federal law, demographic, economic and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and municipal codes from 19,000+ municipalities. Specific information trained to a municipality includes their municipal and zoning code, their city charter, samples of documents like agenda items, resolutions, bills, ordinances, proclamations so that we can train our model to automate templates, formats, styling, as well as provide smart phrasing, language, and structural suggestions.

The second set includes includes things like user inputs, municipal context, and feedback on drafts. As users interact with Legislaide, answering simple questions on the form about their legislative needs or inserting specific text for amendment, our model learns to better understand and predict their requirements. This user-provided information can range from specific details of a proposed legislation, target demographics, stakeholder opinions, intended effects, enforcement mechanisms, penalties for non-compliance, and more.

Please note that Legislaide handles all such information with strict adherence to privacy and confidentiality standards, and it is used solely for the purpose of enhancing the tool's performance and user experience.

What type of personal information do we collect?

Content: Any input you give to Legislaide, such as specific legislative queries or data, and the output that Legislaide produces based on this input.

Log Data: We collect information that your browser sends, known as Log Data, whenever you visit our service. This Log Data may include information such as your computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser version, the pages of our service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, and the time spent on those pages. We use this data to monitor and analyze how users navigate and utilize our platform, helping us improve functionality and user experience.

Usage Data: This is data collected about how and when you use our service. It allows us to understand the patterns of usage, identify any potential issues or bottlenecks, and work towards improving the overall service. This might include what features you use most often, how long you spend on the platform, and what times of day you're most active.

Device Information: We collect information about the device you use to access our service. This may include your device's IP address, browser type, browser version, and other diagnostic data. By understanding the technology our users are accessing our service from, we can optimize our platform to perform best on those devices and browsers.

Cookies: Cookies are small files stored on your device that track, save, and store information about your interactions and usage of our service. They allow us to provide a tailored user experience by remembering your preferences and settings.

Analytics: We use third-party service providers to monitor and analyze the use of our service. This helps us understand trends, track user movement on the service, and gather demographic information. This broad, aggregated information assists us in improving our service to meet user needs and expectations better.

User Feedback: We highly value your feedback and suggestions regarding our service. Such information helps us continuously improve and adapt Legislaide to better suit your research and drafting needs. User feedback may come in various forms, including, but not limited to, customer support conversations, surveys, and direct communications with us. All feedback is treated confidentially and used exclusively for improving our services.

Is personal information used to train Legislaide?

While we are careful to respect privacy in all our data collection and use practices, certain types of "personal" information may be found within the publicly available texts, municipal codes, and legislation that are used to train Legislaide. These can include, but are not limited to:

Names of Public Figures or Government Representatives: Legislation, meeting minutes, and other public documents often mention the names of mayors, city council members, or other public figures involved in the creation or enforcement of municipal laws.

Names of Government Departments or Bodies: Municipal codes and legislation often reference specific governmental departments or bodies involved in their enforcement or administration. While not personal information per se, this data helps Legislaide understand the structure and functioning of various municipal governments.

Geographic Information: Municipal codes and legislation often include references to specific geographic locations, such as street names, district names, or other geographical identifiers.

Public Figures or Events: Publicly available texts might include references to local public figures or events that are pertinent to specific pieces of legislation or municipal codes.

Remember, the purpose of using this data is to enhance Legislaide's ability to understand and generate contextually appropriate legislative drafts. It does not involve storing or using personal information in a way that can be used to identify individuals or impact individual privacy.

At Legislaide, we uphold individuals' rights to access, amend, restrict, delete, or transfer any personal information that may be included in our training data. You can exercise these rights by reaching out to dsar@legislaide.com.

How do we use personal information?

We may use Personal Information for the following purposes:

To deliver, administer, and enhance the Legislaide service, ensuring it aligns with your municipality's needs;
To improve Legislaide and conduct research to further enhance its capabilities;
To communicate with you regarding Legislaide and any updates or improvement;
To develop new features, services, or improvements within the Legislaide platform;
To safeguard our services against misuse, ensuring the integrity of our platform and the privacy of our users;
To meet legal and regulatory obligations, uphold our user agreements, and protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our company, our affiliates, our users, and the public.

Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may aggregate or de-identify Personal Information so that it may no longer be used to identify you. This information is used to analyze the effectiveness of Legislaide, to improve and add features to our Services, to conduct research, and for other similar purposes. Occasionally, we may analyze the general behavior and characteristics of users of our Services and share aggregated information like general user statistics with third parties. We may also publish such aggregated information or make it generally available. We collect aggregated information through the Services, through cookies, and through other means outlined in our Privacy Policy. We maintain and use de-identified information in an anonymous or de-identified form. We will not attempt to reidentify the information, unless required by law.

As stated earlier, we might use Content you provide us to enhance the performance and capabilities of Legislaide. For instance, the user inputs used to draft or amend legislation with Legislaide can be used to train the models that power Legislaide, thereby enhancing its performance and accuracy in drafting legislation.

Who owns the data provided to, and generated by Legislaide?

At Legislaide, we value and respect your privacy and rights to your data. This includes both personal information and the inputs and outputs used in and generated by our system.

Personal Data: Personal data that you provide to us or that is generated during your interaction with Legislaide remains yours. We do not claim ownership of such data. Our usage of your personal data is strictly limited to enhancing the functionality of our services and improving your user experience.

Content: When it comes to the inputs provided by you and the outputs generated by Legislaide during the legislative drafting process, ownership remains with you or your organization. Legislaide does not assert ownership over these inputs or outputs. Our primary function is to facilitate a streamlined and accurate legislative drafting process. However, we may use this data to improve our services, as outlined in our terms of use and privacy policy, while ensuring the utmost respect for your data ownership rights.

How does Legislaide ensure that the suggestions provided and the legislation generated is both accurate and compliant with local laws?

Our algorithm, trained on real-world examples from a growing database of municipal and county codes, can also take into account additional contexts such as the city charter, state laws, and city documents. It also favors suggestions from municipalities with comparable attributes, such as the form of municipal government or their status as a home rule state. This ensures that any drafts generated are not only relevant but also mirrors the governing entity and is in compliance with local laws.

Implicit bias in legislation can have far-reaching implications. Does Legislaide have mechanisms in place to address this issue?

Legislaide addresses the issue of implicit bias through two main strategies. Our first strategy focuses on on equipping users with detailed context and source information relevant to our legislative suggestions. Each piece of legislation used in our AI training process is linked with relevant information, such as the demographic makeup of the legislative body that passed the original legislation, and the specific socio-political circumstances at the time. This allows users to understand the context in which the original legislation was created and to critically evaluate its relevance and potential bias for their current situation.

Our second strategy is embedded in our algorithm, which is designed to pair the primary municipality with legislative examples from other municipalities that cater to similar communities, taking into account factors like demographic, economic, and population data.

However, it is important to note that Legislaide is a tool that aims to support, not replace, the expertise and judgement of professionals who best understand the nuances and needs of their communities.

Can you provide examples of municipalities or organizations that have used Legislaide?

Legislaide is honored to have been adopted in various settings, ranging from local municipal governments to local lobbying organizations, illustrating its versatile applicability. To respect the privacy and confidentiality of our clients, we don't publicly disclose specific names or details. For further details or specific use case studies, please reach out to us directly at info@legislaide.com.

Significantly, one of the ordinances drafted with an early version of Legislaide was officially ordained in June of 2023. This milestone underlines the practical value of our product in real-world legislative drafting. The first draft received positive responses from city officials and community members alike. Beyond this success, a host of other legislative documents drafted using Legislaide are currently in various stages of the legislative process, from drafting to introduction and voting stages.