Law Students

Whither the Law Review?

By Casebook Sherpa

Luke Gilman posted this interesting piece on the future of the law review last week. He collects a number of great sources that are also worth the read.

His basic takes is that scholarly journals, like most print media, are on the decline. While law reviews are at an advantage given their ready access to free labor, there are very few alternatives  for the publishing of legal scholarship, particularly student-written legal scholarship, even if the law review model is dying and subscription numbers are cratering.

This is in part why I’ve followed with interest the progress of The Legal Workshop. A collaboration of the law reviews at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, and Chicago, it is an online magazine version of those print publications. It’s in blog form and it allows comments on posts, which are basically condensed (or “op-ed”) versions of the print articles. As a counterpart to the print versions of these prestigious law reviews, I think it does the decent job of updating the law review model and really translates those 250-footnote law review pieces into manageable reading for most legal practitioners and laypeople.

It’s very good. But it only goes part of the way.

Print media that are doing this well (integrating online presence with offline print product) use their online platforms to generate new stories and ideas that can’t be found in print, in addition to showcasing their offline print reporting. The online presence is basically another print publication with multi-media features and community building components that both expands audience and serves as an additional distribution mechanism for offline reporting.

That’s not what The Legal Workshop is. And that’s fine. But this model could work for a law review (or, better yet, several law reviews and journals) who is/are willing to do it all out. The Legal Workshop may be headed this way. I don’t know. But law reviews have a distinct brand positioning that could make the transition to the web (and specifically the interactive, discussion-focused Web 2.0) much easier.

Law reviews are are an accepted forum for the airing of new ideas. That is a sort of convening function that brings together legal scholars and practitioners to discuss ideas, trends, cases, values, and the like with each other. That is the web at its finest and it mirrors the role of the university as well – a forum for the convening of discussion around ideas. A law review that can serve this convening function through an interactive, multi-media web presence would drastically increase it’s visibility and, presumably, it’s ability to reach a larger audience.

I’m not convinced it can happen, given some of the unique challenges law reviews face (i.e. yearly turnover, volunteer workforce, etc). But if I were to do it, here’s what I would list as my “gotta haves”:

First, you need to be producing shorter form print stories that are more suited to a web audience. More WSJ Law Blog style. Short encapsulations of legal trends and stories, with pithy commentary produced by people who actually have something to say.

Second, you need to be comfortable with dialogue. For those blogs that actually get comments the nature and tone can be less than desirable for the serious discussion of legal theory and commentary. But with the right tone in your posts and presentation,  you can really attract some good discussion.

Third, you gotta have something other than print. Video and audio of lectures, speeches, conferences, symposia, etc. These will make a law review blog more interesting and engaging, not to mention delivering the great content from these fora in real-time (or nearly so) to a broader audience.

Fourth, you need to have law school and/or faculty buy-in. It’s hard to imagine something like this getting off the ground without the active support of a faculty adviser and an administrator who can help you run the political traps at your school (or schools). In fact, this point could kill the idea altogether if you can’t access law school resources like communications, marketing, and IT who can all help answer questions to put in place an effective marketing and tech management plan to make sure your web platform functions effectively from year-to-year.

Fifth, it’s gotta be an integral, embedded part of the law review’s culture. If the Web Managing Editor is seen as a second-class editor on the board, then this idea will never take off. But if it’s a central part of the law review’s identity and role as an arbiter of critical legal issues, then it becomes a very popular position to have and becomes sustainable over years, instead of just being a fad.

Sixth, I’d imagine it requires a paradigm shift in how law schools view the “brand” of their publications. Rather than simply nice print volumes produced each year or each quarter, the law review becomes an essential media channel for the university, pushing out all sorts of scholarly content and information. Obviously you don’t want it to be a mechanism for press releases. But let me put it this way. If a school’s communications strategy lists all the elements of its branding, promotion, and fundraising strategy, do you think “law journals” are listed? Of course not. At least not beyond the fact that they are operating. But if the law journals were a regular source of scholarship, fresh web content, and insightful commentary from professors and students (all carefully edited, of course), you bet law schools would begin to view the law review as an important element of their promotion strategies and would feature them much more prominently on websites and marketing materials. And if your law review is publishing good articles from good authors on interesting topics, you can bet more people will pay attention and isn’t that the point?

I could probably think of more. What am I missing?

In fact, I might even add that local law firms might be interested in helping with this. I’ve found a number of firms that use Twitter and blogs effectively to communicate with clients and prospective employees. If a law review partnered with a law firm and benefited from their marketing expertise it could benefit both firm and school in the long-run. Or if a law review co-hosted an event with a law firm about the latest developments in health reform or environmental regulation or the future of the billable hour that was streamed live on the law review’s blog, don’t you think this would attract a decent sized (albeit not mammoth-sized) audience? And isn’t that the point?

Or is this just wishful thinking?

Full post as published by Fight The Hypo on August 31, 2009 (boomark / email).