Summer is upon us and it is the time for many families to have a little more time together. Without the hustle and bustle of school, things slow down … a little. But when it comes to time, a lot of us spend an equal amount of time with our work family. I call them family because when we think of family we think of people who support us and who we can depend on. And that is equally true of a work family. Now I know not everyone has a Beaver Cleaver version of either family—there can be disagreements and a bit of drama in both—but you are able to count on them for what you need. As I have mentioned before, I am very grateful for my Texas Lawyer family. And I know that because we work together as a team, we achieve things that would be difficult alone—not to mention much less fun.

So in our annual Litigation and Legal Departments of the Year issue, we recognize those work families for their accomplishments this past year. We feature our litigation departments in the traditional profile form and we gave our legal departments a little different spin by running Q&As to give a glance behind the curtain of the successes and challenges of an in-house team.

The quality of submissions we received this year were again stellar, and it makes me proud of my Texas Lawyer readership family. With that said, it is also tough. It is tough because we only have the ability to acknowledge a handful of teams out of many top-notch entries.