Of beginnings and endings.

• Author: Allen, Richard B.
• Position: A managing editor experiences

Janus was the Roman god of beginnings, of doorways, of entrances and exits. It is only fitting that his name, anglicized, to be sure has become our modern month of January. He is depicted as two faces, one gazing each way, a physiological phenomenon that enabled him to see both the past and the future.

I thought of Janus when, as managing editor of Defense Counsel Journal, I wrapped up the January 2005 issue and departed. My beginning was in the summer of 1987 when John Storer and Dick Hayes asked me to assume the laboring oar for the Journal. Overworked and saddled with editorial tasks that belonged to a managing editor, Alan Cunningham was carrying on valiantly as editor of the Journal. But the cupboard was mostly bare, and the hand-to-page supply of material left the Journal less than it should have been.

The editors and editing

As time went by, I worked with other stellar IADC editors Crawford Morris and, since the mid-1990s, Dick Neumeier, whose depth of dedication and eclectic knowledge of the law and litigation have been my guides.

The life of editors is not easy; it's not just turning what someone else has written into type. There is the editorial selection process and the eternal second guessing carried on by assiduous readers. Article is too long. Lacks depth. Missing an important case. Dull. Too wordy. Not relevant to practice. Too theoretical. Too shallow. Too esoteric. Then there's the nitty-gritty the relentless search for smooth syntax, for gender-neutral language, for subject-verb agreement (a surprisingly difficult rule of grammar to enforce), and the checking of facts, citations, quotations, names.

Oh, well, you can't win 'era all. The clinkers are buried without ceremony because there's always the next issue. Fortunately for the Defense Counsel Journal, there were few, if any, losers. Most of its authors are IADC members, who by the very nature of the Association's membership are the cream of defense practice and its intellectual undergirding. Their articles for the Journal and their continuing education presentations, which were adapted as Journal articles came with an imprimatur of quality.

Then the books

During my time at IADC, the Association became a publisher of books, which I edited and shepherded to final publication. The first, the contents of which had been rattling around inside Kevin Dunne's head, was the Defense Counsel Training Manual (1989), intended for use by new associates. After the authors were...