Why Should Lawyers Care About PR?



Posted: Thursday, December 31, 2009

by Jonathan Bernstein
Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc.

Attention attorneys, external or in house. Here's a question you may or may not have been asked in law school:

"If, after months or years of excellent legal work, you obtain positive results for a client -- but the client's business still is irrevocably damaged due to rumor, innuendo, misperception and competitors taking advantage of same -- could you have done something to prevent those losses?"

A Pyrrhic victory, defined, is a "victory won at excessive cost." It is quite possible, for example, that some of the indicted or civilly sued business executives now in the news could, ultimately, be exonerated by the courts. But at what cost? Through effective preventive crisis management, such as vulnerability audits, crisis planning and training (including media training) -- their crises might have been averted or greatly minimized. Through better response, STARTING THE MOMENT THEIR LEGAL COUNSEL KNEW THAT TROUBLE WAS BREWING, damage from media coverage could have been reduced.

Don't discount, by the way, the impact of poorly perceived legal situations on governmental organizations, always sensitive to budget allocations and re-appointment of leaders.

Some of my attorney contacts have woken up to the value of asking "what could a crisis management expert do to help my client/organization" shortly after they learn of a new legal matter.

That allows us to jointly anticipate and work towards minimizing potential negative reaction to the situation if/when it becomes known to important audiences. In other words, we prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.

Time after time, we've found that taking this approach, at a minimum, gives clients/organizations greater piece of mind. And if the stuff really hits the fan, their response is much more effective -- they're not scrambling around trying to figure out what to say and do, because we've already thought it through together, as a legal/PR team advising the organization's top executives.
Attorneys don't, as I understand it, formally have an ethical obligation to recommend that their clients look at a bigger picture than the legal matters under consideration. However, not only does doing so "add value" to one's services, but more importantly it helps PRESERVE THE VALUE of the organization. If you're outside counsel, you'll get a lot more billable time from a long-time client that survives crises relatively intact than from one that fails or suffers greatly. And if you're in-house counsel, your personal future is directly tied not only to legal successes, but to the success of the organization as a whole.

Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. (BCM), http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com, providing crisis prevention, response, planning and training services.  The BCM website has more than 500 articles on crisis management available free to visitors.

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