Page 131 - The First Fifty Years

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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 125

then, Sergesketter’s Army had won a noble, and enduring,
victory.

Beyond. Board 33 and the Decade 4 boards beyond took the
opportunity presented to them to “fill the big shoes” left by Board
32, and they did so spectacularly in numerous ways. Technology,
in particular, was an obvious area for continual improvement, so
Boards 33–40 took advantage of the high-tech revolution of the
1990s to modernize the Review.

Board 33 began the process by “constructing for the Law
Review an elaborate home page on the World Wide
Web[,] . . . [g]iven [its] growing popularity.”47 The editors of
Board 33 recognized that “[b]etter technology is the wave of the
future” and adapted accordingly.48 In addition to a permanent
home on the Web, multiple computers were purchased
throughout the decade, modern copiers replaced their dinosaur
predecessors, the Review acquired an e-mail address, and the
editors began “to discover the goldmine of research available on
the Internet.”49

By Board 37, as the new millennium approached, concerns
arose that the Review’s computers were not Y2K compliant.50 In
any event, Armageddon failed to materialize. And within the
year, a complete redesign of the fledgling website utilized swiftly
developing technologies to make the online HLR experience more
interactive than ever.51 As the end of the decade neared, HLR
could safely say that at least one aspect of its operations had
entered the high-tech age for good. In the spring of 2001, the
Review reached an agreement with its printer to begin
submitting issues in PDF format, rather than through the
increasingly antiquated process of mailing paper copies via
Federal Express.52

Apart from a great leap in technological prowess, the
revamped editing process—which inevitably led to smoother
interactions with authors and consistently on-time publication—
did not go unnoticed by HLR’s peers. Following the publication of
one of Decade 4’s many top-tier authors, who had gone home to
his top-14 law school with superlative praise for the Review’s
processes, Cornell Law School’s dean contacted Board 34’s editors
for ideas on how to improve his home institution’s law review.53
Along with citations to numerous HLR articles in the National
Law Journal’s “Worth Reading” section, two of Decade 4’s IP
pieces were declared by the Intellectual Property Law Review to
be, separately, “[among] the best intellectual property law review
articles recently published”;54 and HLR itself was featured
prominently on Westlaw’s “Welcome to Westlaw” homepage in