We will track here amendments to this resource that reflect changes in law and practice.
PLC now has a professional support team of over 100 experienced editors. Broadly speaking, their activity divides into three categories:
Writing current awareness bulletins.
Maintaining existing resources.
Creating new know-how resources.
The balance between these three core activities may vary according to demands imposed by external developments and the priorities of a particular service.
Across PLC's services we monitor well over 1,000 paper and website sources daily to identify changes that have a practical impact on the work of front-line lawyers. All developments are read and analysed by our editors to assess their significance. They may also call on our wide network of expert contacts in private practice and in-house to help them with this and to identify other important changes in practice.
We cover these changes in our current awareness bulletins and existing resources are updated to reflect them. Depending on the nature of the development, the time it takes to update existing resources may range from a few hours to a few days.
In the case of wide-ranging legislative change affecting large numbers of our resources (for example, the Companies Act 2006) we may include a note in the abstract of all items that are affected but have not yet been updated. In addition, you can see immediately from the resource history whether or not that resource has been amended to reflect a particular development (for further detail, see What is a resource history?).
The following resources are maintained in all our services (apart from PLC Cross-border, see Which resources are not maintained?):
Practice notes.
Standard documents.
Drafting notes.
Checklists.
Case and legislation trackers.
The following resources are not maintained:
Updates.
Articles from PLC magazine, PLC Cross-border, PLC Law Department.
Cross-border Handbooks.
Cross-border Practice Manuals.
Broadly speaking, the Cross-border resources are re-published in updated form on an annual basis.
When a resource is maintained this is clearly indicated under the title.
When a resource is not maintained we provide a publication date.
All maintained resources now have a resource history.
The resource history identifies amendments arising from developments or market practice reviews. They may also include "No change necessary" where a major development has taken place and we decided that the resource did not need amending. Resource histories allow users to confirm at a glance that we have picked up a specific case or new legislation.
In the past we displayed law stated dates for maintained resources on certain services. We updated those dates either following an amendment to the document or, if no amendment was necessary, at least every two months. This gave a misleading impression that as the period progressed, we were not maintaining those resources.
We no longer have yellow highlighting on our resources. This used to indicate amendments made by us to externally contributed resources that had not yet been signed off by the contributor. This gave a misleading impression that all amendments to our resources were indicated in this way. We now include all changes in the resource history, including those that have been made due to contributors' input.