Page 130 - The First Fifty Years

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124 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

and publishing the final three issues in the spring, with the last
issue going to the printer two weeks before graduation.

After identifying every step that went into the process of
taking raw articles to publishable articles—which, in those days,
were physically packaged in a FedEx box and sent to the printer
for duplication and binding45—Board 32 created a flowchart
showing the entire process graphically. From there, it calculated
the total number of weeks that were available to publish five
issues, excluding the summer break before work ramped up, the
two weeks before the end of each semester (necessarily
earmarked for exam preparation), and the entire winter break,
and then divided that number by five. This resulted in the
realization that, to achieve its goal of publishing all five issues
before graduation, the student editors had exactly five weeks to
take each of the five issues from raw articles to finished products.

With that daunting realization before them, the editors
created a calendar showing the exact dates when each step of the
editing process for each article within each of the five issues had
to be completed. This detailed publication calendar would allow
the Review, for the first time in its existence, to register, literally
within 24 hours, every time that it fell behind schedule on a
particular article, thereby facilitating a reallocation of resources
to get back on schedule so that the journal hit the designated
publication date for each issue. After creating the master
publication calendar, the planning team gave every editor and
member a personal copy of the calendar during the first week of
fall classes. According to Sergesketter, the nearly universal
reaction from everyone upon seeing the calendar for the first
time was: “Never gonna happen.”

But it did happen. Indeed, Board 32 published all five issues
on the exact date shown on its master publication calendar. Since
its creation in 1994, that publication calendar, adjusted to reflect
each particular year, has been used by every subsequent board.
For graduating members of the Review, adhering to the
publication calendar means never having to step foot in HLR’s
offices after walking across the Commencement stage.46 More
importantly for HLR as a whole, adherence to the publication
calendar means that Houston Law Review has for nearly 20 years
been able to offer prospective authors guaranteed publication
dates—a not-insignificant selling point when competing against
other reviews throughout the country for top-tier articles.

Thus, as with the founding of the Frankel Lectures, another
great leap forward for Board 32 and Houston Law Review. Given
only diligent successor boards, on-time publication was
guaranteed in perpetuity. Imagine. On that field of battle too,