Navigating PR and marketing crises through law firm-PR agency partnerships

Last updated on January 2nd, 2025 at 02:19 pm

If a business crisis hits law firms, lawyers are already well-placed to manage legal risks. However, just as important is the reputational risk.

This can cause long-term damage to the firm’s brand and risk loss of new clients, particularly in high-profile cases.

How a legal service provider responds to a crisis will reveal whether clients can trust them as a safe pair of hands, or whether prospective clients would be better off taking their business elsewhere.

Partnering with a legal PR agency

Gone are the days when public relations was the preserve of big law firms with in-house communications teams.

Now, it’s essential to have an existing relationship with a specialist law PR firm before any crisis occurs. When lawyers have a matter of minutes to respond to a crisis before it’s reported on social media or 24/7 news websites, there’s no time to start Googling local PR agencies.

Legal sector expertise and PR finesse

Although the type of crises that can hit legal firms are similar to any other small business – cyberattack, data breach, HR issues, the behaviour of staff outside work – customers will expect a legal firm to handle it expertly.

Successful crisis management for law firms starts when things are going well and you have time to think strategically. To effectively mitigate a public relations and marketing crisis, it’s important to have thought in advance about your crisis communications plan and PR strategy.

Media training should take place before it’s needed for any of your leadership team or individual lawyers likely to be put forward as spokespeople in a crisis Don’t rely on a single co-founder in case they end up being caught up in the crisis.

Combining the legal acumen of boutique law firms with the strategic communication skills of a public relations agency with legal sector experience can lead to a well-informed crisis response. This will protect the integrity of the law firm’s profile while maintaining its public image.

Swift response PR for law firms

In order to respond swiftly to a crisis, you need to know about it as quickly as possible. If the first you hear of a problem is when a journalist phones your legal firm, you’re already on the back foot.

Monitoring mentions of your law firm across social media, print media and other people’s websites is a vital part of good reputation management and can alert you to issues as soon as they develop. Your legal PR agency will subscribe to a range of tools and services to allow them to offer this service to you.

When newspapers were published daily, you could spend a few hours crafting a considered response to a crisis. In the digital age to get ahead of bad news, you need to have a statement ready to go instantly.

You can be proactive and engage your public relations agency’s services to produce a series of templates covering your response to a range of likely crisis scenarios.

You’ll need to tweak wording depending on the actual crisis that occurs but you’ll be 80 per cent of the way there, rather than starting from scratch.

This will help you align messaging across the firm and manage public perception. A slow response can cause long-term damage to new business and your reputation.

Unified messaging

Making sure that all legal professionals within your business are giving a unified front with consistent messaging is important for firms during a crisis.

It helps instil confidence in existing clients and potential clients, that your legal firm is on top of the crisis and knows what it needs to do to fix it.

Deciding in advance how you will cascade news of a crisis can save vital minutes. Of course, the leadership team needs to know immediately, but you’ll also need to brief any staff who might get asked for comments, such as your receptionist, on the situation and any lines to take.

You can also put measures in place in advance to show your target audience you are taking a proactive stance to avoid crises.

For example, you could introduce a code of conduct for employees with clear consequences if they breach it.

Legal PR and media relations management

If your law firm is involved in a major crisis, the resulting questions from the media and legal industry can be enough to derail the full service that you’re able to continue offering to clients.

Deferring all relevant media questions to your PR firm can free up your time to deal with and resolve the crisis so that normal services can resume as quickly as possible.

However, it’s important to decide on points of contact within your legal firm for your PR agency to liaise with throughout the crisis to find the answers to media questions swiftly.

Depending on the crisis, PR firms can also help you decide whether to be proactive regarding media coverage and publish a statement on your website and other external communications channels as soon as you’re aware of it, or reactive to direct media questions while adhering to legal constraints.

Reputation recovery for legal service providers

Although you can have plans in place to mitigate the impact of a crisis it can still dent your credibility as a business with current clients, as well as lead to repercussions such as fines.

Reputation recovery should start during the crisis with a communication strategy that demonstrates your law firm’s commitment to rectifying the situation.

A proactive positive PR and marketing plan after a crisis will also be needed for law firms to rebuild trust and credibility. Your PR campaign can include a focus on good PR to increase awareness and push negative issues further down the search rankings; thought leadership; sharing client references; using your website to amplify successes and raising profiles of your lawyers (particularly if the crisis has led to the departure of someone you positioned as a thought leader in your public relations previously), For example, detailing any measures you’ve put in place to avoid a similar crisis occurring in future.

Legal PR: an essential part of planning for law firms

Although the risk of a crisis occurring is small, the potential risk to a law firm’s reputation with potential clients is enormous.

A symbiotic law firm-PR agency partnership can help navigate any serious public relations and marketing crisis and mitigate the long-term impact on your business.

Choosing a PR and marketing agency to work with well in advance of any crisis will enable you to craft a well-coordinated crisis communication plan that safeguards your legal interests, maintains your brand reputation, and assures stakeholders of the firm’s commitment to transparency and resolution.