How We Keep Things Running

We know you’re busy this time of year – thank you for taking the time to read this. Many of you have already pitched in or are planning to make a donation to help LII this year. It makes an enormous difference to the nine of us who provide this service and the millions and millions of people who use it. Thank you.

This time of year has been keeping us busy as well, and the feedback you’ve been sending us has been truly heartening.

“I look up Federal Rules and statutes on LII all the time. It is the easiest and best-formatted site for a quick lookup.” – recent donor William Hubbard

Not long ago, I popped by my colleague Val’s office and discovered her making final pre-publication checks for the Federal Rules updates before they went into effect on December 1st. Unlike the rest of the US Code, the Federal Rules are not made available in a machine-readable format until after they go into effect, so we have always reviewed each change and new rule individually and incorporated them by hand into the text so that users like you would have the changes as soon as they go into effect. The last step is the pre-publication review: where Val’s colleague Craig reads the new text aloud while Val reviews the copy we’ve edited and are ready to share with users like you. It’s painstaking work, and not really the kind of thing a tech-forward group like ours usually talks about, but then we get to hear from some of the two million law students, paralegals, judges, and lawyers who rely on those rules.

“I am an MS Taxation student and I am using this site every day. It is wonderful” – Anji, a recent donor

LII’s engineering team has been prototyping new features for the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations for some time now. But when we went to bring these features to the public, we realized that our publishing software was too slow. Even though we could keep up with legislative or regulatory updates (there are usually no more than a few thousand in a day), it was a strain to regenerate the hundreds of thousands of web pages to deploy each new feature across every section – or even just the Tax Code. So the engineering team rebuilt our web publication pipeline from the ground up – Sylvia tuned the software that finds the processed text; Nic automated bringing in extra cloud hardware for processing; Ayham wrote a new search back end, and Jim wrote the software to generate the website from the content. Now, when we learn something new about the Code, we’ll be able to get it to you – and 20 million other readers of the US Code and CFR – without delay. We know you appreciate that.

“I use your site regularly. It is the most current, and easiest to use, free site for access to the US Code.” – an anonymous donor

Your support helps us help millions of people advance their educations, earn a living, make government more effective, or simply find and understand the law. We hope you will continue to help us help out.

DONATE NOW

Thank you,

Sara Frug
Associate Director
Legal Information Institute