Managing legal and reputational risk
Business News/Analysis -Kate Alexander, co-founder, Crisis and Legal PR, Alexander PR The intersection between law and public perception can be a blind spot for lawyers. Yet today’s digital reality is that damage in the court of public opinion can outstrip that in a court of law. It usually happens much faster, and its potential to impact lawyers’ clients is growing. Now, with the additional layer of large language models (LLMs), AI engines such as GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7, Grok-3 and DeepSeek R1 are becoming the arbiters of truth about you and your organisation. At least in the court of public opinion, it’s not business as usual. Organisations and HNWI increasingly expect joined-up legal and reputational thinking. Law firms that deliver on this will benefit through more work, less case stress, higher fees and bigger reputations. Ignore reputation management, and lawyers leave money on the table. Reputational issues and crises can take an astonishing variety of forms, and serious ones inevitably involve some legal oversight or (increasingly) they relate directly to a court or regulatory process which involves protracted risks. Typically, our trigger for action as Legal PRs is a phone call from a CEO client or their lawyer due to sudden interest from a journalist, a regulator, a consumer representative, special interest groups and the like. Legal or litigation PR has been emerging in various jurisdictions to support legal strategy with reputational risks in the 24-hour news cycle era. It matters not just during a legal case but ahead of its possible occurrence and long after as a dispute simmers and boils. Controversy can hit the bottom line instantly – remember the DGL Group debacle around Nadia Lim? Legal PR involves managing the public narrative across legal disputes and complex business issues (many of the crises we deal with emerge and […]