How did you all deal with complying with rules?
I think there is a better way to ask what I am asking, but I can’t think of a diffrent way right now.
In addition to my numerous other strange jobs on the team, I was also the “legal advisor” along with another future-lawyer. We were in charge of reading through the entire rule book and were ready to recite which part of the rule book any violations were from to make sure that our team was following the rules and that other teams were too. This helped when we were brainstorming and people were coming up with all these wacky ideas, we had to put them in line 
I think it worked well for the most part because we understood the rules which helped with strategy and scouting as well.
Our team basicly does the same thing. We have 2 or 3 people called “compliance officers” and they are responsible for being able to recite basicly any random rule from the rule book as well as any and everything anyone could ever want to know about our robot.
It’s a realy good system, especialy with multiple people doing it because if one person forgets, u’ve got backup people.
hehe, there’s nothing official like that on my team, but a few of us veteran nutcases have poured over the .pdf rules so thoroughly by the first meeting Saturday at 12:00 noon that there’s no room for rule-breaking, and we have them practically memorized.
I don’t think we really have a set thing for knowing the rules. I know our head engineers usually have a copy and always carry the book. The two games that I have drove in so far (2001 and 2002), I know the book - cover to cover - and usually can be found with one nearby.
We just decide on the robot we want to build for the game, and build it. We learn the rules and design around anything that would be a blatent rule violation.
When things are questionable (for instance, we used cables last year to grab the goals, could be considered an entanglement hazard), we figure out if we can defend it against the rules and then build. For instance, we made CAD drawings of our robot showing that even with the cables fully extended, it was impossible for a robot to get entangled, even if it may look so on the field.
Basically, don’t blatently violate any rules. If you question the legality of something you post the question to FIRST, and/or play devil’s advocate with members of your team to try and answer your own questions.
The key is just making sure everyone on your team is aware of the rules and they are being interpreted relatively the same way, then you shouldn’t have much of a problem.
Right after the game is announced (or as soon as we can get the rulebook printed off) everyone is required to read it. By saying everyone has to read it, we know at least half of the people will! 
When we are coming up with a robot design, there is always someone playing the devil’s advocate and saying “well, can we do that? Is it legal? I thought I read somewhere that …”
- Katie
My team has a rules compliance subteam headed up by a student and adult mentor. All the other team leads on the other subteams have to check up with the rules compliance officer before they build anything on the robot. Additionally the rules people check the robot over before we compete in our first sectional preseason event in order to make sure we are fully within the rules.