Did you miss Scholastica’s recent webinar, “New to Law Review: Everything you want to know but can’t find online”? Don’t worry, you can still watch it on-demand! Check out the full recording below.

Preparing for your first article selection cycle as a newly-minted law review editor is a time of great excitement, but also one of many questions. Should your new e-board maintain the same article selection workflow as your predecessors, or are there areas you can optimize? What steps should your new e-board be taking to expand the reputation and reach of your law review? How can you attract more high-quality submissions this year? The list goes on, culminating with the ultimate question — Where is the manual for all of this?!

Since Scholastica’s inception, we’ve worked with hundreds of law reviews that use our article selection software and publishing solutions to help them make successful e-board transitions and keep improving their editorial workflows and online presence. We’ve also supported thousands of authors making article submissions and have solicited their feedback about the article selection process to find out what they need and expect from law reviews. Along the way, we’ve learned many law review dos and don’ts that we want to share with you. That’s why we recently hosted the free webinar, “New to Law Review: Everything you want to know but can’t find online” (because we all know Googling only gets you so far!). Check out the details and recording below!

New to Law Review webinar recording

Key takeaways from the webinar

This webinar is a new resource we’re offering, in addition to Scholastica software trainings, to cover broader law review best practices — from the top advice we’ve heard for streamlining editorial workflows to tips for upping your article promotion efforts. During the webinar, speakers from Scholastica’s customer success team cover how to:

  • Optimize your article selection workflows to make decisions faster
  • Enhance your law review’s online presence to reach more readers
  • Improve your author experience and get more quality submissions

The webinar is designed to help you identify and set actionable law review goals — to leave your journal better than you found it and set up the next e-board for success. Throughout the presentation, we share case studies from past law review boards that were able to set and achieve common law review improvement goals overviewing the steps they took.

Starting with article selection optimization, we provide examples of how to tackle some of the most common law review goals, including ways to speed up your article review process and bring in more quality submissions using a proven three-step formula:

  • Step 1: Write down every single step of your current process.
  • Step 2: Identify redundancies, areas of stress, or gaps.
  • Step 3 Set a realistic and measurable goal (each goal should have clear action steps and associated metrics!)

We also shared a link to the Law Review Starter Kit — your go-to resource for article selection templates, including a free article grading rubric and workflow evaluation guide.

From there, we dive into ways to enhance your law review’s online presence with a focus on improving your article reading experience and search engine optimization (SEO). We overview key online publishing questions all law review e-boards should be asking, including:

  • Can we easily update our law review website?: This is a big one — make sure that your editors have an easy way to make website changes as needed, such as updating your instructions for authors or submission status. (Remember to close submissions when you’re not actively reviewing articles!)
  • Is our law review website easy to browse?: Some ways to improve your online reading experience include making articles mobile-friendly and adding article categorization and/or search functionality to your website.
  • Are our articles discoverable?: Law reviews can make their articles more discoverable online by following SEO best practices, including hosting all articles on their own webpages and adding descriptive HTML metatags to article pages.

Finally, we dive into our number one recommendation to improve your author experience and attract more top-quality submissions. It’s a lot simpler than you may think — just focus on communicating with authors. We share the main article selection updates you should be communicating, including the most important one of all — every single manuscript decision. That includes ALL rejections. Authors actually love getting rejections — if you don’t believe us, take their word for it.

At the end of the presentation, you can tune into a great Q&A with your peers to check out the questions they’re thinking about and hopefully get answers to some of your own!

Check out these additional resources

We hope this webinar will be of help as you embark on your journey as a new law review editor! And we look forward to supporting you and your e-board throughout the upcoming article submission cycle.

In addition to this webinar, we encourage you to check out the many other resources we have to help you learn the ins and outs of your Scholastica account, including the Law Editor Learning Center — your one-stop-shop for Scholastica training videos and FAQs — as well as free live Scholastica trainings. All trainings include time for Q&A at the end! New e-boards can sign up for a live training here.

As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us and a member of our customer success team will reach out to you directly.

Update note: This post was originally published on April 28, 2020 as a webinar announcement and updated on May 29, 2020 to include a webinar recap and link to the recording.