Regulatory monitoring tool: regulators, Légifrance and implementing decrees

The material is public, but scattered across dozens of portals — which is exactly what makes manual monitoring so costly. The official journal comes out every morning. The AMF, Arcom, the CNIL, the Autorité de la concurrence, ARCEP, the energy regulator and the transport regulator each publish on their own site, at their own pace, in their own format: a press release here, a decision as a PDF there, a consultation filed under a section that gets renamed with every redesign. None of those portals knows anything about your files.

The scenario never changes. An authority opens a consultation late on a Friday afternoon, with six weeks to respond. The information lands in someone's personal watch: either a colleague spots it, or nobody does. Three weeks later the trade-offs begin and the industry's position is still unwritten. The final text, for its part, will not be reopened.

Implementing measures follow the same logic, only slower. A law once promulgated refers out to ten or fifteen decrees. They appear six, twelve, eighteen months later — sometimes never. In the meantime the team has turned over, the file has changed hands, and nobody rereads the article that said the details would be "set by decree". The window of influence, meanwhile, opened and closed upstream, during interministerial consultation.

The cost is not measured in subscriptions: it is measured in analyst hours. Opening fifteen portals every morning, discarding what has already been seen, copying references into a shared spreadsheet, rebuilding the history of a bill because a client asks a question at 6pm — those hours produce nothing, they merely catch up. And they are fragile: they rest on one person, their browser tabs and their memory.

The real risk is not missing a piece of information. It is finding it two days after the window in which it was actionable, and having to explain that.

A word on scope first, because the term is ambiguous. "Regulatory monitoring" sometimes means standards compliance: technical standards, sector frameworks, health and safety obligations. That is not the subject here. This is about the normative output of public authorities — what the State, the independent authorities and the European institutions write, decide and put out to consultation, and which eventually binds your sector.

Seven layers cover the job. A tool that leaves one out sends you back to your browser, and the benefit evaporates: monitoring that covers 90% forces you to maintain the remaining 10% by hand, which means maintaining all of it. Some of those layers belong to parliamentary monitoring software, the others to the regulatory sphere; they answer each other far too often to live in two separate subscriptions.

Two requirements matter more than the feature list. The first: a single query must cross all of those layers. If the text lives in one tool and the video in another, you have moved the problem, not solved it. A client question — "what did the regulator say on this point, and where is it written?" — does not split neatly across three subscriptions.

The second: traceability. Public affairs software that produces summaries without references is a black box — impossible to quote, impossible to defend a note in front of an executive team. 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. That is the first filter to apply, ahead of price, when you put together your comparison of public affairs monitoring tools.

Polyfact continuously collects French and European institutional sources, brings them into a common format and makes them searchable together. That currently amounts to more than 4 million indexed documents and more than a million amendments tracked — counters published live on our coverage page, not brochure figures.

The layer most tools ignore is video. Over 27,000 institutional and media videos are indexed, more than 16,000 of them transcribed and timestamped; over 17,000 come from the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament, more than 10,000 of them transcribed. In practice: the head of an authority is questioned in committee and announces the timetable for an implementing decree. Search the phrase, land on the exact second, copy the quote with its source. You quote the words that were actually spoken, not corridor rumour — and six months later, the sentence is still findable.

No black box: every line of a briefing, every answer from the analyst, every entry in the feed traces back to the original document. You verify in one click, and your notes stay defensible in front of an executive team, a client or a journalist. That is what separates a decision-support tool from a text generator.

The AI analyst changes the nature of the work. Instead of a list of results, you ask the question in plain language — "what positions have the authorities taken on this issue since January?" — and the agent investigates across text and video, cross-checks the stated positions, then writes an answer in which every claim points to its evidence. You review and you decide; you no longer compile.

We do not promise exhaustive coverage, and we publish the real state of collection: 60 institutions connected out of 489 catalogued, country by country, on the coverage page. It is verifiable before you buy, and it makes it possible to discuss a scope rather than a promise. If an authority that matters to you is not connected yet, that is where the conversation starts. Data is hosted in Europe and processing is GDPR-compliant.

Public affairs consultant, in a consultancy. You run five to ten files for as many clients, with regulatory perimeters that do not overlap: the CNIL one day, the energy regulator the next. One monitoring profile per client filters and ranks what concerns them; the briefing goes out in the morning, to the right recipients, without anyone writing it. The time you get back is not admin time, it is billable time.

Public affairs lead in a company. Your difficulty is not finding the information, it is deciding what matters and pushing it upwards. You need a short, dated, sourced signal — "this draft decree touches article 12, here is the text, here is who pushed it in committee" — and a note your executives can read in three minutes without calling you back. When the question comes down from the executive committee, the answer is already written and already sourced.

Trade federation or union. A consultation opens: within hours you need to know what the text changes, who pushed it, what was said in hearings, and what your members have to decide. Stakeholder mapping gives you the players who actually carry weight on the issue; transcribed video gives you the verbatim to quote in the consultation response, with its reference.

Analyst or researcher. You produce the material: the timeline of a bill, positions held over time, the gap between the version filed and the version voted, amendments with identical wording grouped together. Exporting to Excel or Word saves the retyping, and every exported line keeps its reference — the table stays verifiable when it changes hands.

Legal and compliance. You are not waiting for legal commentary: you want to know what is coming, when, and with how much room to manoeuvre. Tracking consultations and implementing texts upstream buys a few months' notice before entry into force — the only point at which the organisation can still adapt without working under pressure.