The General Assembly offers the public a free service to track legislation and new public acts called My Legislation. See our quick guide to Using My Legislation below to get started.
This service can also be used to discover new public acts affecting your practice area. For example, although the ILCS query in My Legislation does not give you new chapters, you can search by limiting your query to bills that have passed both chambers and find all of the amendments to the Motor Vehicle Code, Code of Criminal Procedure, Probate Act, Juvenile Court Act, etc.
Jim Covington
Director of Legislative Affairs
Illinois State Bar Association
Using My Legislation
You can find My Legislation In the blue navigation menu at top of the General Assembly website.
Note: Your web browser must allow pop-ups for the General Assembly website for My Legislation to work.
To set-up My Legislation you must provide a user name and password
- To register, click on the Click here to register.
- Once you are registered sign in.
To add bills to your My Legislation look to the left hand side of the screen
- Click on Add Bills.
- Go to the 3rd line down My Bills’ Title (Supply a Name).
- I would name it the topic of your bills (i.e., Business Advice and Financial Planning). Next time you log in to add bills click on the 2nd line down and use the dropdown arrow and Business Advice and Financial Planning should be there already.
- Leave the Session set to Regular.
- Legislation Type change to House Bill or Senate Bill.
- Enter numbers (i.e. 5,8,10,15,20. No spaces, just commas between numbers. If you have a range of numbers (i.e. 1 to 100 you can use Enter number range).
- If you have a comment that you want added to every bill, you can type it in Apply Comment to Added Items.
- Hit Save.
To edit bills go to the left hand side of the screen and click on “Edit Bills”
- The current General Assembly will automatically default.
- My Bills, use the drop down menu to find the file you want to edit.
- My Bills’ Title will default to the same as My Bills.
- To add comments to a bill, you must click on the box next to the bill or bills and then click on the Comments either above or below the listed bills. If you want to add the same comment to more than one bill click on all the boxes next to the bills you want to add the comment to. Don’t forget to hit the apply button after you add the comment or it will not save!
- On this page you can delete your file, copy marked bills to another file and move bills to another file.
To view your bills click on "View" on the left hand side of the screen
- By default, the current General Assembly is selected for you. Click on the dropdown arrow to select the file you want to view (i.e., Business Advice and Financial Planning).
- Click Preview and the page that appears is the bill number and the current status of each bill. From this page you can click on Report Options and create a detailed report of your bills.