Family Advocate
Family Advocate, is the quarterly news-and-feature membership magazine of the Section of Family Law. It addresses current family law topics and provides useful how-to articles in every issue.
Family Advocate board members play an important part in the magazine process. Board members are expected to attend two full-day meetings a year and to serve as a reviewing editor and as an issue editor throughout the year.
Meeting Attendance
The Family Advocate Editorial Board does not meet at the ABA Annual or Midyear meetings, but does meet at the two Section meetings (Fall and Spring). These two day-long meetings we have each year are vital to the process of brainstorming and planning upcoming issues. A board member’s missing a meeting detracts from the group’s sharing of ideas, which helps keep the magazine vital. These meetings also keep individual board members up to date on assignments, issue themes, article development, deadlines, issues in progress, etc.
Members are reimbursed for attendance at board meetings based on our Section Reimbursement Policy.
Reviewing Editor
Reviewing editors read articles sent to them in outline, first, and final draft form and make substantive suggestions. They send those suggestions to the issue editor and to the Editor-in-Chief. The issue editor is the primary person for corralling authors and articles for a given issue. At the fall and spring board meetings, we scope out an issue, with a detailed outline of articles and suggested authors.
Issue Editor
The issue editor takes the issue outline and makes the calls to suggested authors (or others he or she knows) and gets the author's commitment to write, assigns the article and provides deadlines, which are set forth in our annual production schedule. Sometimes, two people are assigned to serve as issue co-editors.
Once the article is submitted, the managing editor sends it out to board members for review and comments. When comments are returned a few days later, the issue editor synthesizes them and passes them on to the author, along with a reminder of the next deadline. When the issue editor approves the final article, he or she sends it to the managing editor and the production process begins.