Moves to choose a successor to Wendy Alexander as Scottish Labour leader will begin this week, the party says.
Ms Alexander resigned on Saturday, after MSPs recommended she was given a one-day ban from the Scottish Parliament for breaking donation rules.
Her departure means the party faces its second successive leadership campaign over the summer Parliamentary recess.
Possible contenders include former health minister Andy Kerr and former communities minister Margaret Curran.
Iain Gray, who was enterprise minister in the first Holyrood administration, is another potential contender - as is Cathy Jamieson, the party's deputy leader for the last eight years, who will be acting leader during the recess.
Colin Smyth, Scottish Labour's general secretary, said its procedures committee would meet at the end of the week to agree a selection timetable.
Any Labour MSP can stand but candidates have to have the support of one eighth of the parliamentary Labour party.
With 46 Labour MSPs, this means the threshold is six - a contender plus at least five MSP backers.
If only one nominee comes forward, the party's Scottish executive and Labour MSPs confirm the nominee as the new leader.
If there is to be a contested election all constituency parties, unions and societies, MPs and MEPs can offer "supportive" nominations.
The candidates who can muster the minimum threshold of support from Labour MSPs go forward to a one-member, one-vote postal ballot.
The controversy which led to Ms Alexander's resignation centred on donations to her campaign to replace Jack McConnell as Scottish Labour leader last August.
The Paisley North MSP had said she had been told wrongly by Holyrood officials that it was unnecessary to declare donations to her leadership campaign.
'Deep regret'
She later updated it with details of 10 donors, who each gave about £1,000 to her campaign.
This was after the Scottish parliamentary standards commissioner, Dr Jim Dyer, decided the donations should be treated as gifts.
The Holyrood standards committee decided on Thursday to recommend that she be suspended from parliament for one day.
Ms Alexander called that decision "partisan" and said she was certain MSPs would overturn it when they returned after the summer recess.
However, she resigned just two days later "with deep regret" and accused the SNP of waging a "vexatious" campaign against her.
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