Little scholarship focuses on the actual experience of creating a dynamic law review or journal. What little that has been printed about journals focuses specifically on over-editing and has been written by professors who may have their own best interests in mind.1 This Article offers concrete advice for new journal editors and begins what I hope is a series of articles educating students who are eager to learn a new craft. Law students who are ambitious enough to join a journal staff do not always have an editorial background or training; that is, the majority were not professional editors or publishers before attending law school. Nevertheless, the institution of law school expects these inexperienced new staff members and editors to know what articles to choose immediately, which authors to solicit, and how to add to an article’s validity through cite checks and line editing. Some student editors handle the implied standards of excellence by pretending that they know what to do, while others repeat the previous year’s editorial techniques and mistakes. In the end, most spend an enormous amount of time reading, editing, and then re-editing and worrying about their work.