The legislative monitoring tool for public affairs professionals

The material is public. That is exactly what misleads people: since everything is online, it feels as though you only have to go and look. But legislative output is scattered across dozens of portals that share neither the same rhythm, nor the same format, nor the same idea of an alert. A legislative file starts on the Assemblée nationale website, moves to the Sénat during the shuttle, returns to a joint committee, is consolidated on Légifrance, is published in the official journal, continues through implementing measures, and sometimes originates in a directive debated in Brussels eighteen months earlier. Every portal has its own search logic, and none of them tells you when something concerns you.

Volume does the rest. On a sensitive bill, several hundred amendments can land overnight: no human can read them all before the next morning's meeting. Most have no bearing on your issue, a handful change everything, and nothing in the official portal separates the two. Manual monitoring then means triaging under time pressure — deciding not to read, without knowing what you are not reading.

Then there is the spoken word, the classic blind spot of document-based monitoring. A decisive share of the information appears in no document at all: it is spoken in committee on a Tuesday evening, by a rapporteur announcing that he will withdraw his amendment in plenary, or by a minister giving a publication timetable. The written record sometimes arrives days later. The video is online the same evening — but it runs four hours and cannot be searched.

Generic alerts and official portals do not close the gap: they do not tie an amendment to the legislative file it belongs to, do not flag a filing deadline and do not search what was said in committee. So the cost is not, first of all, the hours spent: it is what gets through. Amateur monitoring rarely fails spectacularly; it fails quietly. You learn that an amendment existed after the vote, you discover a filing deadline once the window has closed, you write a memo without a precise reference and it does not survive the discussion. On top of that comes an organisational fragility: when monitoring rests on one person, it stops when they go on leave.

The market says legislative monitoring tool, legislative monitoring platform or parliamentary monitoring software more or less interchangeably. The words change, the requirements do not. Six functions separate a link aggregator from a tool a team can genuinely rely on.

The daily feed first: a single surface where the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat, Légifrance, the regulators, Brussels and the press arrive together, ordered by what matters to your issues rather than by arrival time. That is the job of Feed, our live legislative and regulatory stream: you open it in the morning and you know what to follow.

Then the legislative file itself, which is the heart of the job. Knowing that a bill exists is not enough: you have to read it article by article, see who filed what, on which paragraph, with which co-signatories, what the amendment changes in the provision, and what becomes of it — adopted, rejected, withdrawn, dropped. Amendment tracking for the Assemblée and the Sénat must also group amendments with identical wording, otherwise you read the same text fifty times over.

Bill alerts are where most tools disappoint. An alert built on a single keyword produces either noise or silence: legal drafting almost never uses the vocabulary of your file. The right setting is to describe your issue in one sentence and let the tool decide what touches it, at a cadence you choose — immediate while the file is hot, daily the rest of the time. That is what Polyfact's legislative alerts do, across amendments, sitting videos and the parliamentary agenda.

Next, anticipation: a parliamentary calendar filterable by bill, committee and institution, showing amendment filing deadlines next to each text. Monitoring that merely records what has happened always arrives too late; the parliamentary agenda is what makes it actionable.

Finally the spoken word, with debate transcripts indexed by speaker and timestamped, so you can find a sentence and quote it without re-watching four hours of proceedings. And distribution: a brief ready to send, written from the real activity of the institutions, delivered to the right people at the chosen hour.

One last criterion, less visible and yet decisive: traceability. Software that produces summaries without references is a black box — impossible to quote, impossible to defend. The test for choosing a tool fits in one sentence: every claim must link back to its source, the official document, the amendment, or the exact second of video. If your issues sit more with the regulators than with Parliament, the same requirements apply with the centre of gravity moved towards consultations and opinions: that is the subject of our page on regulatory monitoring tools.

Polyfact is an AI-powered public affairs monitoring platform: bill and amendment tracking, timestamped transcripts of parliamentary debates, legislative alerts and stakeholder mapping. Three design choices set it apart from classic document-monitoring tools.

First choice: treat video as a monitoring source in its own right, not as a link to archive. Over 27,000 institutional and media videos are indexed, more than 16,000 of them transcribed and timestamped; for the chambers alone, that is over 17,000 videos from the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament, more than 10,000 of them transcribed and indexed by speaker. In practice: you search for a sentence, you land on the exact second, you copy the quote with its source. You quote the actual remark, not a corridor rumour.

Second choice: sourcing down to the line. Every claim Polyfact produces — a bill summary, an amendment impact analysis, a morning briefing — stays linked to its source: the official document, the amendment, or the exact second of video. No black box: you get back to the source in one click, and your memos stay defensible in front of a board, a client or a journalist. That is also what makes automation acceptable in a profession where an error is paid for in credibility.

Third choice: a single query spanning text and video, from the Assemblée nationale to Brussels, without switching tools. The Assemblée nationale, the Sénat, Légifrance and the official journal, French regulators and independent authorities, the EU institutions, the press and X are searched together; more than 4 million documents and over a million amendments are already indexed. Coverage is public and verifiable: 60 institutions connected out of 489 catalogued, listed source by source on our coverage page.

On top of that sits an analysis layer. You ask a question in plain language — who really weighs on this issue, how this provision has evolved since first reading, which positions were taken in committee — and the agent builds the ranking, cross-checks the positions and returns a written answer, every claim linked to its source. Stakeholder mapping and policymaker profiles extend the same principle: from the issue to the actors, and from each actor to the evidence.

A legislative monitoring tool is not judged on its feature list but on the working day it changes. Here is how it plays out depending on the role.

In every case the logic is the same: one monitoring profile per file or per client, alerts set on the moments when action is still possible, and deliverables that cite their sources. If you are assessing the wider toolkit of a public affairs team, our page on public affairs software covers the uses that go beyond legislative monitoring alone.

The switch usually takes a few days rather than a quarter, provided it is done in the right order. First: write down the perimeter. Which files, which bills in progress, which institutions, which actors — and above all, what you do not want to see. Too wide a perimeter produces noise, and noise kills a monitoring practice more surely than the absence of a tool.

Second: set the profiles and the alerts. One profile per file or per client, instructions written in plain language rather than a keyword list, and a differentiated cadence — immediate on hot bills, daily on substance, weekly on the wider environment. This setting determines how good the tool feels over the first six months.

Third: distribution. Decide who receives what, at what time, and in what form. A scheduled briefing that goes out at 7.30 a.m. with its sources beats a dashboard nobody opens. Monitoring only exists if it is read.

No tool covers the whole of public life, and we will not write otherwise. Our coverage is partial and published: 60 institutions connected out of 489 catalogued, viewable one by one. Not all videos are transcribed — more than 16,000 out of over 27,000 indexed — and we would rather give the exact figure than a flattering order of magnitude.

Nor do we publish a self-service price list: the perimeter, the number of users and the sources followed vary too much from one organisation to another. The twenty-minute conversation exists precisely for that.