On October 27 and 28, Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Rio de Janeiro Law School held the Third Brazilian Legal Journals Seminar, in partnership with Santa Maria Federal University and vLex, a legal content platform. The event brought together editors of Brazil’s 40 most respected legal journals, who debated strategies for standing out from other periodicals. The itinerant seminar is an initiative led by Sérgio Guerra, the dean of the Rio de Janeiro Law School.

The opening remarks were given by Sérgio Guerra and Professor Joaquim Falcão, the editor of the Administrative Law Review. Guerra thanked Professor Angela Espíndola of Santa Maria Federal University for hosting the online event, which due to the COVID-19 pandemic could not take place physically in Santa Maria. Guerra also noted some things that occurred at the first seminar in this series, held in December 2018 at FGV’s main site in Rio de Janeiro.

The event was created by the Rio de Janeiro Law School with the idea of holding it in a different state each year. Thus, Professor Guerra invited the editors to take part in the fourth seminar and called on one of them to offer to host the event in 2021.

Robin Chesterman, vLex’s global head of products, then gave a talk about machine learning, artificial intelligence and the future of technology and knowledge. Leonardo Oliveira, also of vLex, ended the day by presenting the content stored and divulged by this platform.

On October 28, the first panel discussion, called “Challenges in Publishing Legal Journals,” featured Professor Otávio Luiz Rodrigues of the University of Sao Paulo and Professor Flaviane Bolzan of Minas Gerais Catholic University and Ouro Preto Federal University. They discussed the completion of another evaluation cycle by the Brazilian Education Ministry’s graduate education support agency, CAPES, noting that CAPES has not yet made a final decision about new guidance related to the criteria for evaluating legal journals.

The second panel discussion, moderated by Professor Rafael Oliveira of Santa Maria Federal University, was about “Academic Productivism and Its Impact on Publishing.” To finish off, journal editors debated various topics, such as best practices, the financing of periodicals, security and Google Scholar Metrics, outlining a broad picture of the operational dynamics of law journals.