Last updated Oct. 2, 2024
You have asked us to review your work for possible legal concerns prior to publication. We are happy to provide this free and confidential service to U.S.-based student journalists and their advisers. (If you are not a student journalist, unfortunately we cannot assist you.)
Please note that the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) provides information and suggestions only. SPLC lawyers are not licensed in every state and do not represent individual clients. We are not your lawyer. We do not and cannot provide a formal legal opinion.
Pre-publication review can be an involved process and requires time. While we may be able to respond more quickly depending on our caseload, in general, we require at least 3 business days advance notice. If your reporting is particularly complex or lengthy, additional time may be required. We ask that your draft be as finalized as possible. If you are in the early stages of reporting and have questions about specific parts of reporting or writing your story, it’s generally best to address those separately. In rare cases, we may recommend that you contact an attorney in your state. (We may be able to assist you with this, but that takes additional time.) The bottom line is that you need to budget sufficient time for the review process.
The Process
- Attach your draft story to the hotline form or include a link to your draft if using Google Docs (be sure to give SPLC access privileges). Please provide a copy of your story in a format that allows our team to include comments on the document. (For example, use the “suggesting” mode in Google Docs or provide an editable Word document. Note that PDF’s often do not allow for this.) If you have any special concerns that would help SPLC’s legal team understand your story and/or why you are seeking prepublication review, please note them so we can give those concerns extra attention.
- Once a member of the legal team has a general sense of the story and time required, they will generally contact you by email and recommend a time frame for scheduling a telephone consultation. During the telephone consultation, an SPLC lawyer will share their findings, ask questions that may have arisen during their review and offer suggestions. This is also a good time to ask any additional questions you might have. For particularly complex stories with lots of issues/recommended fixes (#MeToo stories, for example, often fall into this category), more than one review may be recommended.
The Student Press Law Center is proud to have assisted tens of thousands of student journalists over several decades in producing the best quality journalism possible. Note, however, that neither SPLC nor its legal staff are responsible for what you ultimately publish. That is always your decision. We cannot, for example, verify the accuracy of the facts you are reporting. We didn’t interview your sources; we didn’t read the documents you are reporting from; we can’t control the quality of your note-taking. What we can do is look for common trouble spots, discrepancies, problematic sourcing, etc., and answer questions, explain risks and offer tips for improvement. (You can find many of those reporting tips for avoiding legal trouble here.)