Legislation drafting is a complex process that takes place in a political and dynamic environment usually involving many stakeholders. Since a new or adapted piece of law often is connected to existing laws the drafters and other stakeholders should be aware of relationships between the law under construction and those existing legal sources. Legal drafting practice has learned that legal quality can benefit from the use of specific legal drafting patterns.

In the SEAL project we have developed a working environment that is to support the stakeholders in de legislative drafting processes. This environment enables easy construction of legal drafts using drafting patterns and supports the creation of connections from and to existing legal sources. The infrastructure is based upon open standards and contain a repository containing existing laws, draft versions and amendments. It offers easy to use access methods.
Collaboration between stakeholders can be easily supported by normal groupware facilities such as automated signaling functions and routing of drafts and amendments.

The SEAL supporting environment will improve cooperation between members of parliament and legislation drafters and allows for more extended forms of deliberation in the future, including citizen consultation processes. Based upon open standards the SEAL environment improves exchange between the European legislative processes and national and municipal legislative processes. Three parliaments were involved in creating the SEAL environment. The initial working environment has now been tested and will further refined and implemented in cooperation with the parliaments and legislation drafters in the near future.