From Concept to Code: D.C. Bar Summit Goes Inside Legislative Counsel’s Work
October 30, 2025
Transforming a legislator’s policy idea into a law is a specialized legal skill, and understanding how enacted federal laws are organized and accessed requires instruction.
Addressing these needs, the D.C. Bar Continuing Legal Education (CLE) Program presented for a second year the Legislative Counsel Summit on October 16 and 23. The program covered legislative drafting, the classification of enacted law into code, the special codification for what is known as “positive law,” ethics concerns, and other topics.
Veena Srinivasa and Kathryn Swiss, both attorneys with the U.S. House Office of the Legislative Counsel (HOLC), presented two sessions focused on legislative drafting. They noted that House representatives and staffers come to the nonpartisan HOLC to convert their legislative aims into the proper text for enacted law. During the process, HOLC counsel maintain confidentiality unless the legislators convey a desire to share information or meetings with other House representatives.
Swiss says that while legislative drafting entails setting words in a certain style, “the heart” of the HOLC drafting process “is that we need to capture a policy idea, and our words that we put on the page have to align with the intent of our clients.” HOLC also considers legal issues that could arise from phrasing in a bill.
Swiss and Srinivasa reviewed drafting particulars, including a bill’s structure, organization, and proper language, such as the implications of using “may” or “shall” — “may” provides authority and “shall” states a requirement.
They also explained that a client’s objective may be served best by amending an existing law, rather than drafting a new one. Srinivasa pointed out that HOLC is not allowed to use AI tools in the drafting process, but there is a tool it uses internally that can compare drafts.
In addition, the two discussed the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo on the drafting process. Loper Bright holds that statutory ambiguities are not implicit delegations from Congress to an agency and that courts, not agencies, determine the best meaning of an ambiguous statute. Their advice: “HOLC’s clients should consider the degree to which they intend to delegate authority to an agency and work with HOLC to make that aspect of the policy clear in the draft.”
“We understand this to be an area of policy choice for our clients with respect to how they want to handle ambiguity in the text,” Swiss said. “Ambiguity has changed completely how we counsel our clients.”
The summit also featured a presentation on technical corrections in legal drafting and amendatory drafting by attorneys Margaret Rose of the Senate Office of the Legislative Counsel and Lisa Castillo of HOLC.
“The faster the drafting process, the higher the probability that the bill will contain mistakes and ambiguous language and create unintended consequences,” Castillo said, adding that mistakes are more commonly found in amendatory texts.
Castillo and Rose offered a few examples of how Congress returns to a text and corrects mistakes. For instance, in one example, to correct an effective date, drafters add a new subsection (a) correcting the date and stating, “[t]he amendment made by subsection (a) shall take effect as if included in the enactment of [the specific law].”
Kenneth Paretzky, who retired in 2025 as senior counsel with the House Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC), led a session exploring “positive laws” in the U.S. Code. OLRC has a different function than the chambers’ Office of the Legislative Counsel, in that the work of OLRC starts after the bill has become law and focuses on where it will be placed in the U.S. Code. Aside from maintaining and editing the U.S. Code, OLRC proposes new titles to be enacted as positive law.
“What positive law aims to do is reorganize, to take related provisions and put them together, which would be easier for the user to have everything in one place,” Paretzky explained in an interview following the summit. “The Office of the Law Revision Counsel does this without changing the law substantively.”
At the summit, Paretzky clarified that positive law is codification, while the placement of general laws and permanent laws into the U.S. Code is classification. Half of the 54 U.S. Code titles are positive law, and a vote by Congress is needed for a title to become positive law. Titles that have been certified as positive law are marked with an asterisk in the U.S. Code.
In the same session, Michael Goad, who recently retired as attorney advisor with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, talked about the executive branch’s role in the codification of positive law and the agency review process, which begins, Goad said, “right after [OLRC] finishes its initial draft of the complete positive law title but before it goes to the [congressional] committees for consideration.”
“What is happening here is you are coming to the executive branch for comments, and we are effectively pressure-testing what the law revision counsel has done to ensure that is a well-organized, nonsubstantive restatement of current law,” Goad said. Most often the executive branch review aligns with what OLRC has done in terms of correcting errors in the text, but from time to time there might be a recommendation as to the pertinent positive law organization, Goad added.
Nakia Matthews, senior legal ethics counsel at the D.C. Bar, and Erika Stillabower, ethics and compliance counsel with the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, presented a session on ethics challenges facing legislative counsel, touching on two recent revisions to the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct.
Rule 1.6(f) now states that a lawyer should exercise reasonable care to prevent “the lawyer’s employees, associates, and others whose services are utilized by the lawyer from disclosing or using confidences or secrets of a client,” a change that applies to legislative counsel “because they go to the organizational duties and the duties of all lawyers to supervise others,” Stillabower said.
“We have to make sure that the people working around us are trained and aware of our ethical obligations as attorneys,” she added.
Changes to Rule 4.4(c), also directly applicable to legislative counsel, involve reading inadvertently sent writings and the need to notify the sending lawyer.
In an interview, D.C. Bar CLE Program Director Dennis Cuevas said that the idea to host the summit was born a few years ago when Goad inquired about the Bar partnering with DHS on an educational training program for legislative counsel. “We enjoy partnering with other organizations, government agencies, and other CLE providers to do joint training,” Cuevas said. “We have some of the expertise with respect to making sure the classes get accredited in all 46 jurisdictions that have CLE requirements for attorneys.”
Goad said the summit addresses long-term training needs on legislative counsel practices and duties. “The need to institutionalize that training, coupled with the desire to attract quality practitioners as presenters, formed the impetus to seek out the D.C. Bar and its programmatic expertise,” he added.
Goad offered a positive review of the 2025 summit. “First and foremost, we saw a number of returning participants — a remarkable phenomenon, given the current state of federal employment and U.S. government funding,” he said. “We received comments that indicate that the summit is fulfilling a specific training need, and some participants are asking for specific legislative counsel practicum experience — strong indices that we are reaching a target population within the legal community and that population is beginning to treat the summit as a fixture of their training calendar.”
Richard Blaustein is a D.C. Bar member and freelance journalist covering the environment, science, and legal issues.
