Legal Register

The Legal Register is the log of legislation, regulations and other legal requirements that apply to your organisation's operations, together with how each one applies and your current compliance status against it.

SHEQ legal compliance is only as good as your knowledge of what actually applies to you and whether you currently meet it. A register that names the specific piece of legislation, records in your own words how it applies to your operations, and tracks compliance status directly against that entry — rather than compliance status living in a spreadsheet disconnected from the legislation it refers to — makes it possible to answer "are we compliant?" one entry at a time instead of reconstructing the answer from memory during an audit.

Each entry has a compliance status of compliant, non-compliant, or under-review, and a next review date independent of that status — so a currently-compliant entry still comes back around for reassessment on its own schedule. New entries default to under-review until someone confirms the actual status.

The list page shows every legal register entry with its reference, title, compliance status and next review date, filterable and sortable by any of those. The detail page shows the full entry; create and edit forms share the same fields.

• Title — required. A readable name for the legal requirement (e.g. "Occupational Health and Safety Act — General Machinery Regulations").
• Reference — required. The specific legislative reference (act, regulation number, section).
• Applicability — required, free text. How this requirement actually applies to your operations — not a copy of the legislation itself, but your own assessment of relevance.
• Compliance status — one of compliant, non-compliant, under-review. Defaults to under-review for a new entry.
• Next review date — required. When this entry's applicability and compliance status should next be reassessed.

Creating or editing an entry validates all required fields, including a non-empty applicability description — a legal register entry with just a title and reference but no explanation of how it applies to you is treated as incomplete.

There is no automated notification when a review date passes or when a status is set to non-compliant in the current version of the product — both are fields to filter and sort the register by, not triggers. An Audit & Inspection Schedule entry (e.g. a "Legal Compliance Audit") is a natural place to work through this register's non-compliant/under-review entries, but the two registers aren't linked by a relational field — cross-reference them manually.

Can compliance status be tracked per site or per department? No — each entry represents one compliance position for the organisation as a whole; there's no per-location breakdown in the current version.

What happens to an entry when legislation is repealed or superseded? The register doesn't have a distinct "repealed" status — update the entry's applicability to reflect the change, or delete it if it no longer applies at all.