I'm about to embark on a co-authored law review article for the first time in many years and I'm interested in how people generally go about co-authoring. The last time I worked with another author in the law review context involved an interdisciplinary article where I wrote with a neuropsychologist. She wrote about the neuropsych issues and I wrote about the legal issues (in the context of powers of attorney) so it was a fairly obvious division of labor. But when two people are sharing their thoughts in the same area of law, what are some of the most effective ways to write? Break it up into sections and each tackle the sections they are most comfortable with? Have one author write a bare outline and then pass the draft back and forth for revisions? Each author take the article for a particular period of time and work on it and then pass it back to the other? I'm just interested in how people have gone about this, although I understand that writing style is a very personal choice and different approaches will work for different people.
Tips for the Novice Co-Author
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Jacqueline, I think that you pose some good questions. I have done a lot of co-authoring and I have found that no two co-author relationships are the same. You make a good point that it's probably a good idea to be very explicit up front about division of labor. It is often a matter of matching good (but distinct) skill sets – that two people equal more than a sum of their abilities. There is also the matter of work habits and incentive processes. Suffice it to say, it's not as easy as it looks. 🙂
I've co-authored a few times and the experience has depended on the authorship, subject, expertise, and journal-type. My last venture (coming out this month on fetal pain and abortion, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1805904 , pardon the plug, with Sad Sayeed a lawyer, bioethicist and practicing neonatologist at Harvard Medical School) involved a preliminary conversation about the idea and what we would say, an agreement that I would take a first stab at drafting, with me leaving large "[I would love you to fill in this Part]" sections, and a few "insert comments" sections on things I wanted him to weigh in on. He then filled in, altered (keeping Track Changes on throughout), sent back questions/comments to me. We then went back and forth 5 or 6 times before we had a draft ready to submit for peer-reviewed journals.
Subsequent to the Article's acceptance and reviewers' and colleagues' comments, we then repeated this same arrangement another 5 or 6 times.
We implicitly adopted a "deference and ownership" attitude where one of us would largely defer to the other on whether to make changes based on comments on a section if the other had written it or it played to the other's expertise.
All in all it was a beautifully painless and productive collaboration. I think this is the my third co-authored paper and each have gone differently. I cannot tell whether this one went so smoothly because we adopted this approach, and/or whether because the piece was shorter than a typical law review article such that we could go back and forth more quickly, but it struck me as a promising model.
Hopefully that helps….
Very interesting – and most helpful, Glenn. Sounds like a great model.