I know a lot of us have been posting lately about Expresso and its impact on the law review submission process in the last few years. Here's another question that I've been asked recently, related to the post I made a week or so ago. I'd actually be interested in any current law review editors' thoughts on this one too. Does the fact that more people are now submitting more articles to more journals affect the reading/reviewing strategies of editorial boards in the sense that it's now much harder to stay on top of new submissions, so the inclination is greater to simply respond to expedite requests rather than reviewing pieces submitted where there has been no expedite request (yet)? If editors are deluged with more submissions than was previously the case, is it possible to keep an orderly review system going or does one end up merely responding to expedites? Or is this no different to the good old days of paper submissions?
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I can't speak to current trends, but I helped with article review and selection a couple of years ago for my journal.
What would be interesting is to here from members of popular journals. I heard stories that some journals receive literally thousands of submissions per issue.
Others, like my own and some others I heard about, receive a much, much smaller number of submissions. And yes, this was during the current ExpressO reign.
The biggest ExpressO impact our journal saw was not necessarily volume, but topical. As a topical law review, albeit with a very broad topic, we received numerous articles unrelated to our topic. During my membership our editorial board kept our topics broad, but it still needed to relate to litigation-related issues (pre, post, and during litigation). We still had to turn down articles on international women's rights, international commercial law, and other random things.
So, in short, my suspicion is that there is an increase across the board of authors sending articles to journals that don't fit the topic because it's so easy to just check the box. (Especially if your institution is paying for the submission.)