by Ken Lopez
Founder/CEO
A2L Consulting

There are a half-dozen annual surveys in the legal industry that ask lawyers and legal industry experts, "who are the best litigation support vendors?" The annual Best of LegalTimes survey is one of the premier surveys in this group. Other high-quality legal industry surveys include those by The New York Law Journal, The National Law Journal, and The Recorder.

Each of these surveys is a valuable local and national resource for almost anyone in the legal industry. Since voting is restricted to members of the legal community, the surveys and the voting results offer an excellent guide for those seeking pre-trial support, trial support and other litigation support services. In addition to the focus on litigation support services, the surveys also ask questions about non-litigation services such as banking, real estate and accounting.

LegalTimes was founded in 1978 and is the top news source for Washington, D.C.'s legal and lobbying industries. It servers Washington, D.C.'s unusually large legal community where 1 in 12 residents in the region is a lawyer. Compare that with about 1 in 250 people nationally. Indeed, fully 1 in 15 of all lawyers in the U.S. works in D.C. (even more are admitted to practice there), and the number of lawyers in D.C. alone is twice that of all lawyers in France.

In 2009, LegalTimes was merged into The National Law Journal, an ALM publication. Fortunately, ALM kept the separate branding and the popular BLT: Blog of the Legal Times.

In the last several years, A2L Consulting has been voted Best Demonstrative Evidence Consulting Firm, Best Jury Consultants and Best Intellectual Property Litigation Consultants in a number of the aforementioned and other publications. To say that we have been thrilled with those accolades would be putting it mildly. It really is an honor, and I deeply appreciate the thousands of votes we have received to date from the legal industry.

While this LegalTimes survey may focus on the DC legal community, I think it is valuable to cast a vote no matter where you are located. After all, firms like ours in the litigation consulting, jury consulting and demonstrative evidence industry usually serve a national audience, as we have done for 18 years. The same is true in other industries like e-discovery, iPad applications and legal research. Since you need not answer every question to complete the survey properly, only answer those that matter to you and be sure to make it to the last page to hit the "done" button.

I would be sincerely grateful if you would vote for A2L Consulting in one or more of the categories we are nominated for this year which include:

1. Best Demonstrative Evidence Consultant (previous winner)
2. Best Jury Consultant (previous winner)
3. Best Trial Consultant