Folks — I’ve seen things. And what breaks my heart is when the lawyer gives you bad advice. Not about contracts. Not about liability. About what to say.
When crisis hits, legal’s instinct is to protect you in court. ‘Say nothing. Admit nothing. Wait for the facts.’ It’s an understandable response from people doing their job. But here’s the problem: your lawyer is trying to protect you in their arena. You’re not on trial yet in a courtroom. You’re on trial in the court of public opinion. And that court moves at a completely different speed.
You can measure response time in that court in minutes, not hours or days. While your lawyer is on the phone drafting careful language, your customers are writing your story. If you’re not your own spokesperson, someone else is telling your story for you — and it is not the story you want told.
I’ve watched legal teams essentially hand organizations reputational catastrophes while technically doing their jobs perfectly. The advice was sound from a litigation standpoint. It was catastrophic from a public trust standpoint. Because trust doesn’t wait for depositions. It’s decided at the speed of social media, and it rarely reverses.
The solution isn’t to ignore legal counsel. Legal needs to be in the room. Their job is critically important. But crisis communications counsel needs to be in the room too, and their job is different: keeping you credible and trusted in the eyes of the public while legal keeps you protected in court.
Sometimes those two objectives are in tension. When they are, you need both voices, not just one. The best crisis response I’ve ever seen? A CEO who said: ‘I don’t have all the answers yet. Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and here’s what we’re doing right now.’ Simple. Human. Fast. Good lawyers loved it. The public trusted it.