Background: Increasingly, state governments provide electronic publication of its official legal materials such as the state constitution, laws, statutes, and agency rules online. Electronic publication of legal materials facilitates public access. Yet with electronic publication, the public concern is whether the legal material is official, authenticated, not altered, and that the material is preserved.

The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) provides states with an outcomes-based approach to the authentication and preservation of electronic legal material. The goals of UELMA are to enable end-users to verify the trustworthiness of the legal material they are using and to provide a framework for states to preserve legal material in perpetuity in a manner that allows for permanent access.

UELMA requires that official electronic legal material be:

authenticated, by providing a method to determine that it is unaltered;

preserved, either in electronic or print form; and
accessible, for use by the public on a permanent basis.

Under UELMA, if electronic legal material is authenticated, it is presumed to be an accurate copy of the legal material. That presumption also applies in every other state that has enacted UELMA. UELMA does not require any adopting state to use any particular technology. UELMA does not require electronic publication of official state records. A state still has discretion to publish hard copies. However, when a state publishes electronically, its users must be able to verify the legal material in the record has not been altered. When the state preserves an official record electronically, it must ensure the legal material's integrity, provide for backup and disaster recovery, ensure the record continues to be in useable form, and make sure it is reasonably available for public use on a permanent basis.

The Uniform Law Commission approved UELMA in 2011. To date, 13 states have adopted it.

Summary: Washington State's legal materials are defined to include Washington's Constitution, session laws, the Revised Code of Washington (RCW), the Washington Administrative Code (WAC), rules published in the Washington State Register (WSR), and state agency rules not published in the WSR. The Secretary of State, statute law committee, and agencies are official publishers for the state legal materials.

If an official publisher of legal materials publishes legal materials solely in electronic form, it must designate the electronic record as the official record and authenticate it. If legal materials are published in both an electronic and a non-electronic version, the official publisher can designate the electronic version as the official record, as long as the publisher authenticates it. When authenticated, the electronic record is presumed to be an accurate copy of the legal materials in Washington State's official records. The same presumption applies to other states' official records if the states publish and authenticate electronic official records under a law substantially similar to UELMA.

Legal materials must be complete, intact, usable, and publically available. The official publisher must also provide for back-up and disaster recovery of legal materials in its electronic official records.

Certain factors must be considered when selecting the technology and methods used to authenticate and preserve official records electronically. These factors include:

the best practices of other jurisdictions;

the users' needs;
compatibility of the selected system with other electronic records systems in Washington; and
compatibility of Washington's systems with those of other states that adopt substantially similar laws to UELMA.

The courts and agencies of the judicial branch are exempt from compliance with this law.

Senate	49	0
House	98	0