Allen Rostron and Nacy Levit from the UMKC School of Law have written an article charting the submission requirement and preferences for more than 200 student-edited law reviews. The article is posted on SSRN, and updated regularly. It does lag in reporting when journals move to the Scholastica platform.
Scholastica is a submission acceptance platform used by more than 700 law reviews.The law library has an institutional account for use by faculty and staff. For further information, please contact Craig Eastland (c.eastland (at) northeastern.edu)
Journals want to publish the best articles possible. The primary signal of an article's quality is the article itself, but there are other signals that could tip the balance in favor of an article.
Formatting the Article
Follow the journal's style guide. If it asks for submissions to be in 18pt Comic Sans MS, so be it. (Just change the font back to something more standard for other journals.) Have your citations as close to Bluebook style as possible, but for tricky sources, focus on readability and consistency.
Have a Good Abstract!
The abstract is the first thing a reviewer will read. Given the number of articles a law review typically receives, it is important to give a reviewer a reason to keep reading.
Update Your CV
If a law review is going to use your professional history as a factor in publication, do not force them to hunt the internet for it. Your CV is an opportunity to show your authority one a subject. This is epsecially useful for newer scholars who do not have a long history of publications.
Some journals, particularly peer-reviewed journals in the sciences, require an exclusive opportunity to review a submitted work. If you are considering submitting to one of these journals, do not post work work on public repositories like SSRN until you are sure it will not jeopardize your submission's status.