Laws Consolidated is a company formed by Neil Adsett in 2004 to enable him to expand into all aspects of the production and management of official laws for various countries.

Neil Adsett developed from general legal practice in Australia, to specialise in writing laws and then into the wider field of producing and managing the entire suite of laws for various countries around the world. These countries and the work undertaken for them is listed in this resume, as are numerous relevant consultancy projects.

Laws Consolidated has been based in the British Channel Islands and in Brisbane Australia, and has delivered law revisions and published the resulting laws for these countries – Fiji, Tonga, Tuvalu, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, St Helena and dependencies, The Bahamas and Jersey. After his tenure as Attorney General of the Kingdom of Tonga, Neil Adsett is again taking on new projects in these and related legal fields.

With the unique experience of successfully dealing generally with all aspects of the laws of many countries throughout the world, Laws Consolidated and Neil Adsett are ideally able to give broad expert advice to governments considering reforms to aspects of their laws.

I see everywhere that in many smaller jurisdictions the statute book is becoming obscure – many of the laws are out of date, very hard to find, out of print, often not indexed, and overlain with new and conflicting provisions...

This work was typically done under statutory authority and in the countries that I have worked in we have continued this practice – before the project starts we foster and enact a law that authorises the law revision, defines the powers of the Law Revision Commissioner and the status of the resulting revised edition. The old schemes were virtually the same everywhere and the modern empowering Acts enable the same whilst also catering now for regular updating, computer versions and the internet.

This is the procedure I have developed and it more or less works for me and delivers the product that is designed – but this will differ in each place so you may adopt any of these ideas and take aboard what you want. In the legal sphere Commonwealth countries have many similarities and I see many of the same Acts and procedures that were inherited, borrowed or produced by international agencies. But every law revision or drafting undertakings must be tailored uniquely for the particular circumstances in each country.

The Detail If anything was omitted from that then I leave it omitted and list the omissions. Find and read every new law – Acts as well as subsidiary legislation; and I also look in the government gazette at the general notices in case something of legislative effect has been published in the wrong place. I always look for the official copies signed by the Governor in case there is a difference in versions.

A complete new revised edition always used to be published in book form in however many volumes were necessary. This format is good as a permanent record and even now it is usual to have a number of sets bound as books for formal and archiving purposes. The drawback is that books cannot be updated and so the loose leaf editions became more common...