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166 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW

HLR’s published authors have been grateful for the Review’s
promptness, one notable professor “scolding” the student editors
for being “so efficient, prompt, precise, and conscientious it
makes all of the rest of us in the world look bad by comparison.”55
Another professor commented to Board 43’s Editor in Chief: “I
must tell you—your staff is the most professional I have ever
worked with. Including the grand poohbas at Harvard!”56 David
Nimmer was so pleased with his experience that he provided the
responsible board a supply of liquid courage to celebrate the
publication of an IPIL Symposium issue.57 Deserved recognition,
no doubt, for tireless efforts culminating in a job well done.

As with publication promptness, the Review’s growing
financial clout likewise had begun years prior with the
publication of the Texas Rules of Evidence Handbook.58 Decade
5’s boards built upon prior successes, negotiating favorable
contracts with vendors and publishers, funneling excess funds
into a robust endowment, and promulgating a comprehensive set
of financial guidelines to ensure that each new board is
sufficiently educated concerning HLR’s monetary responsibilities
and appropriately assisted by the faculty advisors and Board of
Directors to be good stewards of the organization’s purse. Thanks
to such actions, the Review was able to weather two serious
national financial downturns and emerge profitable at the end of
its first half-century.

Internally, addressing a long-overdue oddity, Board 49 and
Board 50’s editors, on advice from the Board of Directors and the
organization’s faculty advisors, recalibrated the numerical
publication cycle. At some point in Decade 3, the numerous books
and special issues published by HLR had created a publication
logjam that put the Review’s issue numbering perpetually “off.”
Following Board 49’s publication of Issue 49:2 (the last of the
1380 pages of its five scheduled issues), Board 50 officially
remedied the discrepancy, printing issues 50:1 through 50:5.
Future volumes now will correspond directly to the number of the
board printing them.59

The Review was similarly responsive to ever-developing
technologies, constantly updating its website to conform to
those of peer journals, replacing old copiers with newer high-
tech models, and buying new state-of-the-art computers.60 On
the editing front, an entirely electronic system was
implemented, and two internal electronic databases were
created to store master source files for each individual cite
check and give each student greater access to various resources,
including a dedicated HLR e-mail account and detailed
electronic editing instructions.61