Legislative Drafting Editing and Proofreading Services

Legislative drafting is the only writing where a misplaced comma can create a right or destroy one, and where the reader you must satisfy — a court, decades from now, applying the words to a situation nobody imagined — cannot be consulted. Drafters work from instructions that are often incomplete, to timetables set by political necessity, producing text that will be read adversarially by people with money at stake. The craft is conservative for good reason: every innovation in form is a new opportunity for a meaning nobody intended.

We edit what drafting offices and legislative counsel produce — bills and draft legislation, regulations and statutory instruments, amending provisions and consequential amendments, definitions and interpretation sections, commencement, transitional and savings provisions, explanatory notes and memoranda, regulatory impact material accompanying instruments, drafting manuals and house style guides, plain-language versions of enacted legislation, consolidations and revision projects, model provisions and precedent banks, training material for instructing officers, and guidance for departments on how to give drafting instructions. Our editors work within your office's conventions, which vary considerably between jurisdictions, and we do not import preferences from another tradition.

Transitional provisions are where otherwise excellent bills fail, because they are drafted last, under time pressure, about a period nobody wants to think about. The policy is settled, the operative provisions are clean, and then the question arises of what happens to an application already in the system on commencement day, a licence issued under the old scheme, a proceeding part-heard, or a person who accrued an entitlement that the new Act does not recognise. We work on these so each category of person or thing straddling commencement is identified and dealt with explicitly, so the transitional rule states which law applies rather than leaving it to inference, so any power to make transitional regulations is scoped rather than left at large, and so savings provisions preserve what was intended and not, as commonly happens, more than was intended. The test we apply is simple: for every reader who was mid-process on the day the Act commenced, can they find the sentence that tells them where they stand?

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence. We are editors rather than legislative counsel or legal advisers and offer no view on policy, vires, or the legal effect of any provision — the drafting judgement remains entirely yours. We ask that instructions covered by Cabinet confidence or legal professional privilege not be sent to us. What we can do is check consistency, cross-references, defined-term usage and readability across a long instrument.