by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting As we approach the end of 2016, I'm reviewing the many free resources that have been viewed and downloaded from A2L Consulting's extensive litigation-focused website this year. From podcasts to blog articles to free downloadable e-books to free webinars, we have given back this year to the trial community more than ever. Our blog has been accessed 250,000 times, our 20+ free e-books have been downloaded tens of thousands of times and more than 1,000 new subscribers have signed up for a free litigation and persuasion-focused blog subscription in the past year. To help sort through all that data and information and focus on just the best content and resources, here are the 10 items, all completely complimentary and without additional obligation, that saw the most intense attention this year from the litigation industry's top players. Visits to A2L's free resources (podcasts, e-books, webinars etc.): This central set of resources allows visitors to our site to direct themselves to the information they most need. Storytelling for Litigators Webinar: The science of using storytelling for persuasion is in its nascent stages. This webinar explains what is now known and how to best use storytelling techniques to influence other people’s thoughts and conclusions. The Patent Litigation Handbook 4th Edition: During A2L's more than 20 years in business, intellectual property cases have represented nearly half of our total work. Therefore, it’s no surprise that when we want to update one of our handbooks, we often turn to our patent litigation handbook. It’s a perennial winner. The Voir Dire Handbook: I'm surprised by how popular this book is, but voir dire continues to be one of the most searched for terms on our site. We routinely help support trial teams during jury selection and conduct mock exercises that have a voir dire component. Complex Civil Litigation Handbook: This book is a necessity for anyone who enters civil courtrooms, develops theories for civil cases, or works on complex civil litigation.
by Tony Klapper Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting At A2L, we strongly believe that strong visual presentations are indispensable to courtroom success. But great visuals don’t just create themselves. Top-notch litigation graphic artists are the ones who make unforgettable visuals, and that means that graphic artists need to be a crucial part of any trial team. And good graphic artists aren’t easy to find. As a graphic design website explains, a great graphic designer should “love art in all its forms” and “should live to create and to be inventive.” A graphic artist needs to understand color, composition, typefaces and dozens of other design elements and to use the best digital tools available.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting In the first quarter of 2016, A2L Consulting reported record amounts of business and web traffic. Well, those numbers have only continued to climb throughout the second and third quarters of this year. High stakes litigation is booming across the industry, although it's not heavily concentrated in any one law firm or in any one business sector. Every year, more than a quarter million visits are paid to A2L's blog, The Litigation Consulting Report. Each year we publish more than 100 articles focused on highly specialized areas of persuasion science, jury consulting, high-stakes litigation, and the use of litigation graphics at trial. To help our readership find the very best articles, we publish "best of" articles like this one throughout the year. Today, I'm highlighting the five articles that you, our readers, voted the very best of the past two quarters. I think each is a fascinating read. 5. 10 Criteria that Define Great Trial Teams: Our top trial experts at A2L seek to distill the essence of trial preparation and develop a numerical way to measure its quality and predict success. 4. 50 Characteristics of Top Trial Teams: We tell our readers what the unique characteristics of the top trial teams are. Some of them are quite surprising.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting As trials become more and more complex – just think of the intellectual property cases worth billions of dollars that have rooted the attention of Silicon Valley and the world – litigation consulting has become more and more important. There may be fewer jury trials now than there used to be, but many of the cases that go to trial can shake up an industry. “Litigation consulting” is a broad term that describes a broad variety of services that help lawyers try and win cases. They include jury and bench trial consulting, litigation graphics consulting, on-site courtroom technology support and similar services. In a given case, a trial team may need all the services that A2L provides, or just a subset of those services. In order to show how far the litigation consulting industry has come in a relatively short time, we are issuing a free --- page book, The Value of Litigation Consulting. The book explains why even the best trial lawyers can benefit from the services of top-notch litigation consultants. It’s a handbook that shows where the industry has been and where it’s heading. The book is full of useful, hard-hitting articles on these topics, including 11 Things Your Colleagues Pay Litigation Consultants to Do, 6 Secrets of the Jury Consulting Business You Should Know, 12 Reasons Litigation Graphics Are More Complicated Than You Think, How Long Before Trial Should I Begin Preparing My Trial Graphics?, 11 Traits of Great Courtroom Trial Technicians. You can download the book here - completely free - no strings attached.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting Anyone who puts together a team to represent a client in a high-stakes piece of litigation is engaging in an act of leadership. To be successful, such a litigation team needs to blend the skills of an outside set of trial lawyers from a law firm, large or small; in-house corporate counsel; the leadership of the client company, which will want to keep close tabs on high-stakes litigation; a wide variety of paralegals, assistants and other key nonlawyer personnel; and, in all probability, a trial consulting company such as A2L. Today we are releasing the fourth edition of a new and free eBook on leadership for lawyers that can be downloaded here. I hope that it will be useful to legal industry leaders, whether running a trial team, a practice group, or an entire law firm.
by Tony Klapper Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting I was reading the Washington Post’s Business section on Sunday morning, and a front-page article about Sean Parker caught my eye. Parker, dubbed “Silicon Valley’s Bad-Boy Genius,” co-founded Napster and was the first president of Facebook. He was also played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network.” Far from a routine business profile, this article provides several fascinating lessons concerning the importance of creative collaboration. Apparently tired of catering to the entertainment needs of millennials, Parker recently launched the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Although it was notable that Parker invested $250 million to support groundbreaking research into eradicating a disease that kills millions each year, even more important is his model of creating a “sandbox” for scientific research. At press time, six premier medical research institutions—Stanford, Hopkins, MD Anderson, UPenn, UCSF, and UCLA—had signed up to be part of the consortium that Parker is creating to fight cancer. The premise behind the effort is that working together in the sandbox is far more effective than working alone. That truism is not one that is always followed.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting The first quarter of 2016 was one of A2L Consulting busiest in our 20+ year history. Not only was business up, visits to our web site increased 10% over the first quarter of 2015, and our Litigation Consulting Report Blog reached 8,000 subscribers. These metrics suggest that the litigation industry, particularly the big-ticket litigation segment, continues to perform well. The growth in the number our blog subscribers is truly eyeopening. Just a little more than year ago we were celebrating reaching 5,000 subscribers. I still find it completely amazing that about 200 people sign up for our award-winning litigation and persuasion-focused blog every month. Since we launched this publication that now sees more than 250,000 visits every year, hundreds of new clients have found their way to A2L and thousands more have benefited from the information we have shared here, from free articles to free e-books to free podcasts to free webinars. Five years ago, I thought the whole idea of blogging was misguided, and boy, was I wrong. To enhance our reader's experience, each quarter we help surface those articles have been "voted" the very best in the most recent quarter. That is, if we publish 25 articles in a three-month period, some are going to be viewed more often than others, and these are effectively voted the very best. These six articles below were voted the very best by our readers in the first quarter of 2016. 6. Millennials and Jury Psychology: Why Don't They Follow the Rules?: A jury consultant analyzes the jury psychology of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and focuses on this generation's distrust for authority. 5. A Jury Consultant Is Called for Jury Duty: A well-known jury consultant finds herself in a Manhattan courtroom as a prospective juror and describes her experiences.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting In 20 years in the litigation consulting business, I've seen a lot of successful trial teams and some that are not so successful. A team that is successful needs good leadership. In fact, good leadership and good preparation are the best predictors of a trial team's success. We've written before about effective trial team leadership and even released an e-book on good litigation leadership skills. Good leaders force timely preparation, they delegate effectively, and they put their egos aside in the interests of a successful outcome. One important challenge for good trial team leaders is knowing when to make changes to the team. These changes can amount to anything from adding new lawyers to the team, removing lawyers and support staff, or even releasing vendors and hiring new ones. I have seen a fair number of litigation consulting firms removed at various stages of the litigation. Many times, we are the firm that is brought in to replace the removed firm. An important part of the work of a good trial team leader is to ensure that a good litigation consultant is chosen. This is not an easy decision. Many companies that claim to be top litigation consulting firms are actually nothing more than trial technology firms or everyday graphic arts firms. The list of high-quality providers can be counted on one hand. So, unless you have first-hand knowledge about a firm and the people you'll be working with, there are plenty of ways to make mistakes. Fortunately, these can be corrected if you have a good reason and the courage to make the change. By far the biggest reason I have seen firms removed from their roles in jury consulting or litigation graphics consulting is a lack of creativity. This is understandable because creativity is a hard thing to judge before you work with someone. Often these removals occur after one phase of the litigation and before the next. For example, in patent litigation, we are often brought in for the trial after another firm provided no meaningful suggestions or advice to counsel in the pretrial phases of the case. I've also seen many examples where we are brought in after remand for the second bite at the trial apple. Sometimes a trial team says they just didn't get any value from their litigation consultants. There are many reasons a trial team would need to switch litigation consultants as they prepare for a mock trial or litigation graphics. It must not be forgotten that this type of switch is an extreme outcome that runs the risk of doing harm. It shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. Yes people: I actually had the CEO of a competitor once ask me, “Why would I give litigators advice?” I indicated politely that his instincts were correct. HE shouldn’t do so. There are many like him in the industry. They can be a source of support if you’ve simply hired them to run your PowerPoint during an opening statement. Some just have no business taking the extra step and adding value, because bad advice is worse than no advice. Missed deadlines: On my first day of law school, my criminal law professor stopped a student trying to enter class late. He said, “You are attempting to enter the only profession in the world for which you can go to jail for being late.” There is never an excuse for being late. The creatively challenged: It’s common for technology people to masquerade as visual persuasion consultants. They should be pretty easy to detect. See Why Trial Tech ≠ Litigation Graphics, 16 PowerPoint Litigation Graphics You Won't Believe Are PowerPoint, and 21 Reasons a Litigator Is Your Best Litigation Graphics Consultant. The jury hack: As a top jury consultant wrote, there is no license required to become a jury consultant. So there are many “consultants” who are simply not qualified to gather data in a sophisticated way. Some trial technicians try to offer advice on a jury during voir dire. This is litigation consulting malpractice in my view. See, 6 Secrets of the Jury Consulting Business You Should Know and No Advice is Better Than Bad Advice in Litigation.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting The importance of developing a strong narrative in your case is well-established by science and by what we have all observed in the actions of jurors in real cases. In spite of the law that may be against you, in spite of the facts that may be against you, a high-quality narrative can win a case. We've written about this extensively and articles like Storytelling Proven to be Scientifically More Persuasive, 5 Essential Elements of Storytelling and Persuasion, and $300 Million of Litigation Consulting and Storytelling Validation provide a good background on the power of story, whether in a case tried to a jury or to a judge. Great litigators don't push back on the need for story anymore. Indeed, they arrive at our doors in quest of ways to fine-tune their narrative and make it more convincing. We help them by testing any number of possible approaches, by conducting practice opening statements, and by developing a persuasive visual presentation for the litigators. One bit of pushback that we do continue to hear is about injecting emotion into a case. Particularly from defense-side clients, we hear that all that’s needed and appropriate is a narrative – but that in this particular case, the narrative need not be compelling and emotional.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting I wrote about Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy's body language TED Talk in 2012. Her findings about how striking a power pose can measurably affect your persuasiveness are as relevant for litigators today as they were four years ago. Professor Cuddy has released a new book called Presence, and it is filled with an even greater wealth of useful information for litigators. She goes into detail about what one can do to prepare for a high-pressure situation like a job interview, a competitive swim meet, or a venture capital pitch - all situations similar enough to an opening statement that we can safely assume the same advice applies. When one is delivering as their best self, they are said to be exhibiting "presence." She says that presence is most clear to others when "we feel personally powerful, which allows us to be acutely attuned to our most sincere selves." In other words, when we believe in our message and believe in ourselves, we are in fact scientifically more believable to others - and there are ways to hack your own brain, like the power pose, to make these findings work for anyone. Make no mistake, presence is not about feigning confidence or passion. Instead, exhibiting presence is more like being in sync with your true self. For these techniques to work and for you to maximize your persuasiveness in the courtroom, you really must authentically believe in yourself. But how? Her suggestions for achieving presence are not conjecture. Cuddy roots her advice in solid science and rigorous study. For example, one study involved analyzing videos of 185 pitches to venture capitalists. In this setting, much like the courtroom, there is a clear winner and loser. Key behaviors (all sub-elements of presence) of all the presenters were assessed and compared with those who were successful in getting venture capital funding. The results are fascinating. Four factors clearly dominated all others in determining who got funding:
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting Since our founding 20 years ago, nearly half of our consulting work has involved patent litigation. Patent cases are uniquely suited to our brand of consulting, which relies on storytelling, persuasive demonstratives, and the simplification of complex materials for communication at trial. So it is with great pleasure that we release the 4th edition of our Patent Litigation Toolkit (download here). It seems obvious that our litigation consultants and litigation graphics consultants would routinely help patent litigators make their cases presentable and digestible for jurors. After all, these cases are often incredibly complex, involving issues of detailed mechanics, organic chemistry, and cutting-edge electronic technology. Less obvious perhaps, is the need for good storytelling. In fact, a lack of good storytelling is the undoing of many a patent case and patent litigator. After all, jurors will develop a story about your case whether you give them one or not. If you've done your trial preparation correctly, you will have offered one to them that they can believe in. This complimentary 270-page book is designed to help you with all of your patent litigation challenges - from storytelling to the simplification of complex material. I think you'll find articles like these very helpful: 5 Tips For Inter Partes Review Hearing Presentations at the PTO 11 Tips for Winning at Your Markman Hearings 16 PowerPoint Litigation Graphics You Won't Believe Are PowerPoint Introducing Mock Markman Hearings to Patent Litigation Trial Graphics in Patent Litigation - 11 Great Demonstrative Tips Explaining a Complicated Process Using Trial Graphics 10 Things Every Mock Jury Ever Has Said 5 Questions to Ask in Voir Dire . . . Always 5 Essential Elements of Storytelling and Persuasion 12 Worst PowerPoint Mistakes Litigators Make
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting I am very proud of A2L Consulting's role in the creation of the job title "litigation consultant." Over the years, this position has evolved somewhat, but it remains substantially similar to the way we designed it in the mid-1990s. Back then, it was my full-time job. Today, I still get a chance to do parts of it now and then, and after 20 years, I believe it's the best job in litigation. The role of a litigation consultant is to work with trial teams and help them develop the best visual and rhetorical strategies for persuading factfinders at trial, ADR, or in any dispute. In the 1990s, no one but the attorney-consultants at A2L called themselves litigation consultants and few if any firms offered a similar service. Now, litigation consultants are generally litigators themselves often hailing from a large law firm. They spend most of their time directing the development of persuasive PowerPoint presentations, working with jury consultants in mock trials, and helping top litigators more effectively tell their stories at trial. As we've written before, this role is becoming increasingly important in the litigation industry where even top litigators make it to trial only once every few years. By contrast, a litigation consultant may see the inside of a courtroom dozens of times or more per year. If you love litigation like I do, this is the best job in the world. Here are nine reasons why I think this is so. Trial. Let's be honest, the best part of litigation is not the endless years of paper pushing in advance of trial, it's the theater of preparing for and performing at trial. A litigation consultant skips all of the pre-trial tedium and gets to engage in all the best parts of litigation. See, 11 Things Your Colleagues Pay Litigation Consultants to Do.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting Last month the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in nine years. This action signals that the Fed believes we are entering a period of sustained and significant economic growth. Although the Great Recession officially ended in 2009, for a lot of people, this Fed action may mark the emotional end of it. Economic conditions do feel considerably better than they did just a few years ago. Most people who want a job can get one now. However, most jobs pay less than they did 10 years ago. Furthermore, a staggering 40% of people over the age of 16 do not have a job. That's the lowest number since the Jimmy Carter years. So, we can't quite say things are rosy, but we can't say things are terrible either. After all, in 2009, more than 700,000 jobs (including a lot of legal industry jobs) were being lost per month, and now, 250,000 jobs are being added to the economy in a typical month. What does this all mean for those of us who work in the litigation industry? Will 2016 be a good year? The answer, I believe, is that while it will not be an incredible 2005-like year, it will probably be a little better than 2015, and that's not too bad. Let me support that belief with some additional details. This is the fourth year I've written an economic forecast for the litigation industry. For 2013, I forecasted improving conditions for all of us, and we saw the economy grow by 2.3%. That was actually a significant improvement over the year before which saw many law firms not growing or even shrinking. For 2014 (also including a mid-year update) and 2015, my forecast was about the same, and so were the results - modest growth. For law firms and their litigation departments and for litigation support firms like A2L Consulting, these past several years have been growth years. But will it continue? After all, recessions come about once every seven years, and the last recession occurred in 2009.
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