On April 10, 1995 the University of Richmond Law School published the first online law journal, The Richmond Journal of Law & Technology. The editor and instigator of this journal was a guy named Rick Klau. I didn't know him until we crossed paths in the blogosphere where both of us wound up in the world of Radio Userland. Somewhere along the way I learned that Rick had started one of the first purely online law reviews, and after hearing his account of events I thought it might make for a good online interview.

EES: Give me the spiel on how you wound up starting an online law review. Was it the first one?

RK: JOLT was the first student-edited online law journal in the world. If memory serves, there was a faculty-edited journal of some kind out of the UK. We narrowly beat groups at U. Michigan, Berkeley's Boalt Hall, and Harvard to the punch. Several of us spent an entire sleepless weekend to publish the first issue, because we knew the others were close. We'd all met at a CFP conference in California, and the competition was fierce. The first US faculty-edited publication followed us a few weeks later - ironically, it was down the road from us at William & Mary. And the editor in chief, Trotter Hardy, was a contributor to our first issue.

EES: Whose idea was it to start an online law review?

RK: It was my idea, but I had a lot of help. Most of it tracks back to the spring of '94, when a handful of us started the Richmond Law & TechnologyAssociation. We really started the group as a way to bring speakers to campus to discuss emerging questions of law & technology. Our first event was to bring then-staff counsel for the EFF Shari Steele to campus to talk about "cyberspace law". Shari is now the executive director, by the way.

The more we thought about it, the more it became obvious that there were a ton of issues that few lawyers were thinking about. Over the summer, JOLT took shape. I was clerking for EFF that summer, and myself, Brennen Keene --who made law review and decided not to stay with JOLT-- and Ben Leigh were all in northern Virginia. We met several times, sketched out a law journal that would focus on the Internet, and planned to go back to campus to get the Dean's approval.

EES: I'm sure there were political and funding machinations you had to endure, right?

RK: Funding was an issue, but I think that's true of any new student organization. It's hard for the administration to discern between students who are committed and those who are looking to pad their resume... so I don't think our struggle for funding was unique. In many ways, we were fortunate - the Dean was a big supporter, and made some funds available from a discretionary fund to buy us a couple computers.

Something I'd forgotten until you asked the question was that we didn't originally see this as an online-only publication. But two things worked to make it a focus: speed and cost. We did some research at the early stages, and found that most new journals took 18 months to 2 years to start. We were starting this at the beginning of our second year, so it was entirely possible that the first issue would come out after we graduated - and none of us wanted that. We believe at the time we were the fastest journal ever to get to publication - we went from initial proposal to publication in just eight months.

Cost became another factor - if we were serious about getting it printed, we'd need a budget of tens of thousands of dollars to cover printing, distribution, promotion, etc. We got a couple computers from the Dean, but we weren't likely to scrape those kinds of funds together. At the time, U. of Richmond had just the Law Review - no other law journals at all.

This was a progressive school - one of the things that attracted me to Richmond in the first place was that it required incoming students to own laptops. (This was 1993.) This commitment (it really came from the Dean, Joe Harbaugh) meant that when a bunch of students showed up wanting to push the technology, it was hard for the school to say no.

One hurdle was "official" recognition by the law school for the scholarly nature of the work. Law Review and Moot Court were credit-granting extra-curricular activities, but that was it. Even though students put in the same amount of time and energy into JOLT, it was a de facto second-class organization because you didn't get credit for it. I'm happy to say that last year, by unanimous vote, the faculty made JOLT only the third extra-curricular activity to receive credit.

EES: What about getting articles?

RK: Soliciting authors was extremely hard. We had a number of associate professors around the country who had interesting things to say, but ultimately decided to go with more "traditional" law reviews because they were paper based. Why? They weren't sure that their tenure committees would see an online-only publication as legitimate. That got easier when we got West and Lexis to agree to carrying our stuff, which they started doing in the fall of '95. But it still was an uphill battle.

Another unexpected hurdle was, of all things, citation. For a work to be scholarly, you need a way to cite to it. And in the legal profession, that means having the Blue Book tell everyone how to cite to you. Since we were the first, there was no Blue Book standard when we first published. The original editorial board created our own standard - and a year later it was adopted by the Blue Book. I think now the Blue Book even uses JOLT as its example citation, which is not bad for publicity. Most interestingly, we even got West to adopt our citation standard. We did away with page number citations - we didn't have any pages, after all - and went to paragraph numbers. Obviously, in legal citation, you need to be able to direct people to where the quote/idea comes from. Traditionally, that was accomplished by directing them to the article/opinion, and then to the page in the book where the idea falls. I believe West continues to try to assert copyright on its page numbers, which is an entirely separate discussion. But we actually got them to agree to follow our way of citing - which could have created a completely vendor-neutral citation standard. But as far as I know --I haven't followed it all that closely-- paragraph numbers haven't replaced page numbers. They are more specific, vendor neutral, independent of any page layout, etc. - but why would others want to use it?

EES: I assume that all of the old issues are still available online along with the current ones, right?

RK: All issues are archived online. We tried to create a standard naming convention for all "issues": such as http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/vxiy/. Where x is the "volume" and y is the "issue". Each academic year is a new volume. My Letter from the editor in the first edition is accessible here. In addition to the web, every article is now published concurrently on Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw.

EES: You said it was hard to get articles, so then how did you get articles for the first Journal?

RK: The first issue we went with folks I'd "met" online: Trotter Hardy (professor at nearby William & Mary), Dan Burk (then a prof. at George Mason, but who is currently at U. Minnesota). Both presented at a conference we put on that spring; we also had three articles by students at U. of R.

Moving forward, I think several people were intrigued by the notion of publishing online. Of course, there's the issue I mentioned earlier: that anyone worried about tenure often expressed concerns about publishing with us. But we did the usual things: mass mailings, got ourselves included in the index of legal periodicals, made sure that there was some coverage about us in the press - so people who were writing about law & technology issues generally knew about us.

We weren't exactly swimming in submissions, but it at least got us through the next issue. And by then, we were passing the baton to the next editorial staff. We ultimately published two issues in two years; subsequent staffs would publish as many as five issues in one academic year.

EES: Can you pinpoint --as someone familiar with the process-- some of the key benefits of having an online law review, as opposed to traditional printed journals?

RK: I think the biggest advantage is timeliness. Check out my original letter from the editor; that explains a real scenario involving our first issue:

"Finally, while doing a final edit of Dan's article, I checked out Adam Curry's Metaverse site for a needed break from editing. On one of Adam's pages, I noticed a small comment that said "The war is over. Don't ask cause I can't tell." I was pretty sure that this was in reference to the MTV v. Curry law suit, but was surprised that I hadn't heard any announcement to that effect on any of the discussion lists I subscribe to. After exchanging e-mail with Adam to confirm that the lawsuit was settled, we were able to find an Information Law Alert announcement made about two weeks ago. A quick e-mail to Dan appraised him of the change, we agreed on the revised wording in his article, and The Journal was again up to date."

You can't underestimate the value of hyperlinking. Not only can you link to other resources online (at that point in time, something that you only got through proprietary services like Lexis and Westlaw), but you could also hyperlink the article itself. It seems minor now, but we came up with the idea of hyperlinking to the footnote, and then giving users the ability to round-trip back to where they were in the article (click on the footnote number). The user experience was much more functional - you could explore a footnote, then return to reading the main article - without worrying about where you were in the document.

Finally, reach is another big benefit. We had users from all over the world in less than a year. From the second issue's letter from the editor:

"Since April, we have had over 33,000 hits - an average of more than one hundred hits per day. But hits don't tell the whole story. We have received quite a bit of attention since we published our first issue. Articles published in The Journal are already being used in classrooms around the world to teach the lawyers of tomorrow the law of cyberspace, and several Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminars around the country have used our articles in their prepared materials to teach the lawyers of today about this developing field. Newsletters like Of Counsel and the Law Office Technology Report have given favorable reviews to our work. And if our content wasn't impressive enough, our resentation won raves as well: in August, Point Communications ranked us in the Top 5% of all web sites on the Internet, and included us as one of only eleven legal web sites in their book, The World Wide Web 1000."

Whereas traditional law reviews are limited in reach to law libraries, we were available to anyone with a browser. Anyone publishing an article in an online law review dramatically increases the odds that their writings will get a broader audience.

EES: In your view, is there any reason, other than inertia (or the prestige of certain printed journals like the HLR), that would stand in the way of distributing scholarly legal articles online as a matter of course?

RK: I think inertia is a big factor. However, I think costs, speed and distribution will combine to make online publication the predominant form for scholarly articles within the next five years.

Last update: 8/15/2002; 1:31:17 AM.