FiscalNote Prophecy: An Algorithm For ‘Washington Man’
Technology columnist Sean Doherty checks out FiscalNote’s Prophecy, a service that provides insight into legislative data for business and legal professionals.
Many organizations have lobbyists or consultants that monitor proposed legislation that may affect the organization or its business. Even Ayn Rand’s main industrialist in Atlas Shrugged (affiliate link), Hank Rearden, had a “Washington man” to protect Rearden Steel from proposed anticapitalist legislation. But if Rearden used Prophecy from FiscalNote Inc., he could have stayed more true to his character and monitored legislation himself.
FiscalNote’s Prophecy is collaborative software as a service that provides insight into legislative data of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Congress, for business and legal professionals. Prophecy’s search and bill-tracking features provide relevant and timely legislative data to subscribers and, with machine learning, the service calculates legislators’ sentiment and forecasts legislative outcomes — with over 94 percent accuracy, according to FiscalNote.
Prophecy has three levels of subscriptions: Basic, Plus, and Premium. Basic allows you to search bills, save searches, and get real-time alerts on pending legislation. Plus adds predictive analysis for bill passage and related bill information to a Basic account. A Premium subscription includes Basic and Plus features with legislators’ biographies and staff information. A Premium subscriber gets access to a leglislator’s effectiveness score as a primary bill sponsor across bill categories from agriculture to health care and transportation.
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Prophecy’s search function in the top right-corner of the user interface is powered by Boolean connectors AND, OR, and NOT, and filters. But you need not be an expert searcher to use the service. Select the entity to search: bills, legislators, or committees. Add terms and phrases in quotes to a Google-like search window. The search engine assumes terms and phrases are connected with AND—the union of terms. Use OR to find at least one of the terms or phrases entered, and NOT to exclude the word following the connector. Note that capitalization and punctuation are ignored and an asterisk * is used after word stems to match multiple suffixes.
Filters hone search results and can be used before or after keyword searching. Filters appear in a panel on the left side of the user interface to include or exclude legislatures. I turned on filters to include the U.S. Congress (Senate and House of Representatives), California, New York, and the District of Columbia. In one click I turned these jurisdictions into default search parameters. By default, the current session of selected legislative bodies are applied. To use previous sessions, uncheck the current session filter and select the sessions.
Prophecy filters include legislative chambers, such as senate or house; bill status (active or inactive); date ranges; categories, which are groups of bills based on similar content; bill sponsors and co-sponsors; and party affiliation (Democrat, Independent, Republican). Filters vary depending on the entity searched.
After I became familiar with the search function, I clicked the funnel icon in the upper right-hand corner of the UI to create a Discovery Filter. A DF is a saved search strategy that periodically updates or alerts you to new results. Note, however, that the DF default connector is OR not AND.
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Figure 1: Search results for “(security or data) notification breach,” monitoring California, the District of Columbia, New York and the U.S. Congress. Results are listed by their relevance to query terms but can be reordered by bill number or the date of the last action taken on the bills. Click image to enlarge.
Bill records include pre-floor and floor forecasts of the probability that a particular bill will reach the floor of the legislative body or pass once it reaches the floor, respectively. The figure above shows a Discovery Filter with an aggregated forecast of all bills relevant to the filter. Individual bill records display discrete forecasts to Plus and Premium subscribers.
Figure 2: Bill information with a brief description of the bill, a link to the bill’s text on the official legislative website, related bills with similarity rating, and an in-depth FiscalNote forecast with reasoning. Green up arrows indicate positive factors and red down arrows are detractors. It would be nice to see excerpts of the actual bill text forecasting a “really negative effect.” Click image to enlarge.
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Bill information includes a visual timeline from introduction to passage with textual descriptions for milestones, a breakdown of whether legislators are more or less likely to vote favorably on the bill, and a dialog box to enter text that can be shared with other FiscalNote users in an organization.
In the dialog box, I typed the @ sign and typed the user’s name and a drop-down list of FiscalNote users matching the typed characters appears to select users and add them to a discussion thread, which appears below the dialog box. Users are alerted to the discussion via email, which serves as an invitation to discuss the bill. The discussion field must be set to “organization” not “individual.” Otherwise the text entered is private and serves as a note to self.
Bill information can be bookmarked and saved to folders. The saved bookmarks act as alerts to notify you of bill activity and status changes.
FiscalNote’s export feature works anywhere in the platform to generate reports in CSV, XLS, or PDF format, to analyze and share with colleagues. There are no limits on downloading data, but it would be nice to simultaneously download a PDF and XLS version of a report.
Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.
