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If you are on journal next year, getting your Note published is the easiest way. Other than that write an article with a professor or practicing attorney. Although it is really time consuming that way.

One caveat: getting published may sound good, but you better stand behind what you write because it may come back to haunt you later.

target wrote:If you are on journal next year, getting your Note published is the easiest way. Other than that write an article with a professor or practicing attorney. Although it is really time consuming that way.

I have published several articles over the past year and I can tell you getting your Note published is key. There is a strong presumption on journals not to publish work from students not in their school/on their journal and most will not give a random student the time of day. One of the ways journals weed out student submissions is to look at their resume. If there is no publication history, then their article has to be Earth shattering to get an offer. However, if you get your Note published it makes getting subsequent articles published much easier, as you now have a publication history.

I actually prefer getting an attorney co-author, not only because I can then write the article at work and get paid to do it, but because having their name on it opens up like 500 journals to submit to who otherwise explicitly state no student submissions. Most are willing to waive this if the lead author is an attorney.

A great way to begin is The Student Appeal Law Journal. I know its online only and really a semi-academic journal, but again, in the beginning its all about getting a publication history. You could easily write a 2500-3000 word article for them and they make decisions quickly and get your work up quickly.

Im pretty experienced on this topic both from the publishing side and because I am the editor on my journal who chooses articles for publication, so if you have any questions about the process feel free to PM me.

Sorry, I only thought about scholarly journals when i wrote my post. Yankeesfan was right on in terms of all journal (i.e. both scholarly and trade).

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assuming my most recent one gets picked up soon (which it looks like it should be) that would be my quickest. Took me about two weeks to pick a topic and write and then depending on when i get an offer 3-4 additional weeks to get an offer. However, it would likely be for the fall or even next spring so utll take anywhere from 3-9 months to get in print.

The whole writing and submitting process takes a long time usually and journals literally could not make decisions any slower so the process is frustrating. If your looking for a quick publication either do the student appeal or write a shorter article fir a journals online supplement.

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i took a class on corporate governance and since that contains so many different sub topics i usually just pick one and write about it. Sorry thats not more specific but once you get really into a topic and have read a lot of articles on it you know what the literature on it says and you know what approaches havent been taken and where there are voids that need to be filled.

In general you just find a topic that you like, check the news to see if there are any new developments on it and then go from there. My newest article is on a topic from work so if your working watch out for issues that pop up that dont have a tangible answer as these tend to make great law review articles.

Excellent topic, jsa.

I've had three scholarly articles published, all in 2012. The first one was the most influential piece by far, and started the law school transparency movement. It had a few thousand downloads on SSRN. Despite this, nobody accepted it while I was in school. (We published it spring 2L on SSRN and started a press onslaught). We submitted it to maybe 50 journals and law reviews. The issue was that we were students. Tons of press around our piece...and it didn't matter.

Finally, I received an email down the road. Somebody read it from Pace Law Review and asked for us to submit it. Within a week it was accepted. Ended up re-writing it because so much had changed in the time elapsed. It was finally published over two years after the initial coverage.

The other two pieces were by invitation. The Michigan Journal of Law Reform asked me to write a companion piece to another journal article. The other was the Journal of Law (Journal of Legal Metrics). It's online-only and the review process was different. They approached me because they liked LST's data analysis. It's a new-agey journal and the absolute best place for what we wrote -- the methodology and justification for the LST Score Reports.

I have another piece coming out in about a month, though I just started it today. It's with the Nebraska Law Review for the online publication. They also asked me to write.

Personally, I'm only going to write scholarly pieces when asked. I submitted another piece to about twenty journals that may or may not have been fit for publication (the Winter Index Report is available on my SSRN page: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsB ... id=1408251). Nobody interested. For me, the credential is nice, but I'm able to influence more through other writing. Sometimes it's the only place that's appropriate, though. (Example: the MJLR piece.)

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Let me add one thing. I find writing is the best way for me to collect my thoughts. It forces me to organize and communicate as well as possible. My trouble is that writing takes me for-ev-er. I operate best on deadlines, and I have very few real deadlines.

It makes me a better advocate, and it helps certain people take me more seriously. You have to have a reason behind writing it or else it's just not worth it. It's a lot of effort. And your piece has to be particularly polished to get accepted before you're a professor.

I would also say that, when you write, actually try to contribute to the body of knowledge. If you can't think of a way you can contribute, don't write it. Do something else with your time.

And now that I'm just writing all of the thoughts that come to mind, writing guest blog posts is a good outlet for contributing and practicing writing. I take a very academic approach to columns, whether on a news site or on blogs. I try to liven it up a bit, but that's just not me.

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Be nice to the executive board of your school's law review, because even if the faculty chooses your article to be published the board will find a way to fuck you over if they don't like you.