September 14, 2000 - A Lobbyist's Best Friend, by Alice Cabane
Forbes
If you need real-time data on a bill that can make or break a client, GalleryWatch is your baby.
A Lobbyist's Best Friend by Alice Cabane
Brent Golemon created GalleryWatch.com for folks like Hector Rivero. A lobbyist for Humana Inc., Rivero was tracking a state bill that would require the health care giant to provide additional data to the public (interest groups as well as consumers)--at a cost of more than $1 million. It was so near the close of the Texas state legislature's session that Rivero was confident the bill wouldn't come to a vote. In fact he was already working on another issue in a senator's office. But just in case, he'd prepared a suggested amendment that required a study to show how this additional information would benefit the public.
Suddenly his pager beeped--a GalleryWatch alert. The bill's author had just obtained a "suspension of the rules," allowing a committee to debate the legislation. Rivero rushed over to the statehouse in Austin to find one of his supporters, who happened to be on the committee. When the debate came up on the floor, so did the amendment--which effectively killed the bill.
Given the complexity and volume of legislation--not to mention the stakes involved--bill-tracking has become a necessity. More than 140,000 bills a year are considered in state legislatures; 25,000 actions take place each day. Trouble is, traditional watchers, like Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw, lag two days to a week behind events, making them useless for last-minute strategizing. The Library of Congress' Web site, thomas.loc.gov (for Thomas Jefferson), takes two or more days to make the data accessible. As for comparing different versions of a bill, it's still akin to translating Sanskrit.
All of which makes Gallery-Watch.com invaluable for tracking real-time information on the status of bills. The idea was born four years ago when Golemon, a political staffer, and Haidar Khazen, an electrical engineer, met at the wedding of a common friend. Along with Walid Touma, a Lebanese-born computer engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, they built a system to page lobbyists with bulletins on things like the fate of particular legislation, while they made rounds inside the state capitol building. Seed funding by Austin-based Triton Ventures, among others, totaled $2.6 million--enough to develop a Web-based service covering all Texas legislation.
GalleryWatch gets its hands on a bill very soon after it is filed with legislative clerks, sometimes days before the public sees it, and can make hard copy immediately available to clients. That's on top of the notification service the client gets every time he needs to know of some telling event. Once the filing takes place GalleryWatch runners, who sit in on every single committee hearing and markup, send specific information--from the final voting tally and every attached amendment to individual voting records of every legislator--through the Internet to a central database. From there GalleryWatch's tracking and notification software delivers that information to clients in the form that they've requested--e-mail, mobile phone, fax and so on.
From Texas, GalleryWatch has expanded to Washington, D.C. and New Mexico. Its 500-plus clients--including American Airlines, Arthur Andersen, Boeing and the Los Angeles-based law firm White & Case--pay $2,000 to $25,000 per legislative session, depending on the number of users and services provided. Revenues have been doubling every year since the 1996 launch; GalleryWatch hopes to pull in sales of $3 million over the next 12 months, which would make the company profitable. But just now it's burning through $110,000 a month.
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