Is Your Law Firm Prepared for a PR Crisis? with John P. David

Episode Notes

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand, and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your,

John P. David:

Hi, my name is John David. I’m president of David PR Group. We’re a public relations and marketing consulting firm. We handle corporate reputation, crisis communication, thought leadership, and presentations and speeches for clients.

Karin Conroy:

John, thank you so much for being here. This is a topic that we’ve had a handful of PR people on the show talking about how it works, all that stuff, but I think this is going to be how lawyers can handle it for their clients and all that stuff. But the title for the show is Your law firm prepared for a PR crisis. So I really want firms to start to think about how you might be prepared, how you might react, what you might do if it happens to you. So of course you think in terms of if a client comes to you and they’re having some kind of a crisis. So let’s first start with that because that’s the most obvious and the place where people’s brains start is your client calls you and they are having some kind of a PR crisis and their first thought is, I need my lawyer to get this to stop. First of all, where do you usually come in and where do you feel like you should usually come in? I feel like those are probably two different places, right?

John P. David:

Yeah. I think that it’s hard to come in completely cold without any relationship at all. That’s really the trickiest thing. But most of the time I have clients that have issues that they’re just big companies and they have issues on a regular basis. And typically when I get called is when information goes public in some way by someone who has reach. So it’s either like a local TV station is calling, the local newspaper is calling, or a national newspaper or a trade magazine or somebody that has a real reach or an influential blogger or someone like that is reaching out to them and asking them for comment about something that happened. And that’s typically where I come in and I get those kind of calls all the time, anytime strange times, weekends, holidays, this happened, what do we do?

Karin Conroy:

So in those cases, are you usually somewhat aware of this thing that’s happening or is it usually out of the blue?

John P. David:

Typically it’s out of the blue mean, but everything is, when you’ve done things for a while, you kind of understand the rhythm of a crisis. And so for example, so what happens is something happens with your client, something goes wrong and say there’s some type of malfeasance. It could be at a business that has an embezzlement or something happens or there’s a data breach, things that could impact a law firm could impact a bank or credit union, a real estate company or any company. And so there’s usually the calls I get is, okay, guess what? This just happened and the local TV station is calling or the local newspaper is calling, or somebody posted this on social media and we’re not sure how to handle it. And that’s typically where I come in.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. So I feel like there’s two buckets here. There’s a situation that you can somewhat predict or prepare for and then there’s stuff that you don’t expect. So I would put the data breach into something that you could predict and prepare for, whether it may happen or not, you can prepare for it as well as even something like a social media misfire. So let’s go down the things you can prepare for avenue first and what are your recommendations for now before this has even happened to you, your firm, your client, anyone? What should you be putting in place so that you’re kind of ready and prepared as sort of an insurance policy?

John P. David:

So the first thing is that every organization should have a media policy.

And a media policy is a simple document that just explains to employees and reminds employees. This can go in the employee manual once the lawyers sign off on it that says, you’re an employee of this company, you’re not a spokesperson for this company. If someone reaches out to you, if it’s from a newspaper reporter, a television reporter, a blogger, a social media influencer, and they’re asking you to comment on something about the company, you’re not a spokesperson, be kind and cordial to them, but refer them to X. And that could be your head of corporate pr, it could be the head of the company, it could be an external consultant. So number one that you have so that you don’t have something happens at your organization and then the TV station’s outside a guy or gal gets off their shift, walks outside and they go, what happened in there? Oh, lemme tell you exactly what happened in there. So believe it or not, even though I’ve done media training for years and years, and I always say the ambush interview is very atypical. I mean when the guy, the old 60 Minutes thing where the guy’s chasing the CEO O across the golf course, that doesn’t happen that often. That happened because the CEO was dodging 60 minutes for months.

But there are situations, I had it just happen pretty recently for one of my clients where a public event, some of their employees were at this event and there was a TV crew and the TV crew was trying to wrangle employees to get ’em on the air. And I had to actually go and do the, we’re not doing that today. It was the first time I’d ever done it in 30 years where I was actually put my hand up and said, we can’t do this. But for the most part, having that media policy in place so that everybody’s in line so everybody knows it’s be nice, don’t be mean, don’t say we have no comment. It’s not your job to say that either. All your job is to say if you need to talk to somebody, here’s who you call. So you have that in place and you make sure that that makes sense. So that does everybody know how to reach the top people when the time comes? Right. In other words, do you have everybody’s phone numbers and everybody’s mobile numbers? I mean, it’s pretty normal these days that everybody has a real mobile number, text message, whatever else, but it’s important that they know how to reach everyone.

Karin Conroy:

Well, I was just thinking of two different examples when you were saying that on a website, the equivalent is going to be a privacy policy, and this is once again just to cover your bases to say if you’re using Google Analytics for example, you have to disclose that. You have to say, we’re collecting this kind of information. It’s also really important to make sure that’s updated. Did you do your privacy policy maybe eight or 10 years ago? And maybe the contact person that’s in that privacy policy doesn’t even work at the firm anymore. This is something that needs to be reviewed and updated on. I would say at the very least an annual basis, probably more often than not, if you’re a firm that has the potential to be targeted for PR and you’re in the media and you’re being noticed more than average, but this is just a standard thing that someone in your firm should be responsible for your media policy, your privacy policy, your website terms, all of these things should be kept up to date.

And also the last thing I’ll say on that just and then I’ll get off my soapbox, is that privacy policies change all the time. So the one that we use stays up to date with legal requirements state by state, and you should be too. You’re a lawyer. And this is one of those things like if you have a media policy, make sure that you’re up to date with this is the accurate thing to be saying, and we’re legally saying the right things legally and having the right contact point. But some huge chunk of the battle is having everyone have something in their minds about, okay, if this were to happen, I now know what to say and what not to say because I know later we’re going to talk about these murder mysteries. But this one that I just read, I promise I’m going to bring this back around, but this one that I just read, there was a really critical part of the story where the detective kept getting cornered by this reporter and the reporter would not leave them alone. And this was a big part of the story where the reporter took it to a certain place and it changed the outcome of the story as well as the media. And then the whole story changed. Obviously this is a fiction story, but you can see the point where if you’re not prepared and you get cornered and you don’t know what to say, chances are it’s going to be bad.

John P. David:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And the other thing is that you don’t want people saying no comment. You may ultimately decide as an organization that you don’t want to comment, but you want to have that option to have that conversation. That’s another part of it is that we can talk about in the sort of bucket number two like we talked about, I mean to continue to the question, the point is that, so once you’ve identified your media policy, so now you know what the sort of, okay, here’s the chain of command you need to respect and all that. And then the next thing that every organization should do is they should just as they have a plan, I’m in South Florida, so we have hurricanes,

Karin Conroy:

Right?

John P. David:

And most people know the rules know how it works with hurricanes. Essentially what happens if there’s a hurricane warning, it’s 48 hours before they expect a storm to happen and the town shuts down basically every week, go hunker down kind of thing. And the office buildings actually close and you can’t stay at work even if you wanted to. So you go home, right? It’s ingrained. But what you need to do for crisis communic is think about what’s my worst nightmare as a CEO? What could happen that would really derail my business and that crisis and all those crises are relative. So you could sit there and say, okay, what if my big concern is that a freighter hits a bridge in Baltimore and all my goods are on it? Or I could say, what if one of my employees gets hit with a sexual harassment claim? Or what if my controller walks in the door and says, yeah, we’re down a million bucks and I

Karin Conroy:

Think Bob has a nice new car.

John P. David:

That’s right, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right. No, I think Bob or Roberta took it, right? So it’s like, and I don’t know where it went. And so those are the types of things which used to start to worry about. And because now some of these things may never be outside the door. I mean, they may never be outside the realm.

Karin Conroy:

Sure, hopefully.

John P. David:

But at the same time it happens. I mean, early in my career there was a business that had an embezzlement and they sued the accounting firm and it’s bad. There have been high profile cases. There was a huge case down here in Florida involving a big financial scam, and there was a big accounting firm represented these guys and they didn’t survive. They left, they were out of business. They couldn’t survive because they were always seen as the accountants for this bad guy.

Karin Conroy:

Well, I feel like that’s a good segue into that other avenue we were talking about, I think I called it a bucket earlier, whatever we want to call it. But the other category is the unexpected crisis. And in that area, I also want to put the same level of unexpected ideas behind. Maybe it’s not your client, maybe it’s your own firm. And that kind of comes back obviously to the whole title of the show. So you mentioned a few of those examples, like you are running any kind of business, you are running a law firm. There are things that could happen that you need to at least be prepared for and think through in terms of a sexual harassment case. Examples ahead of time.

John P. David:

Every business has issues with, one of my old accounting clients used to say a defalcation, which is a fancy word for somebody who stole money from you. So you have the same things that happened. I’ve represented, I had an online reputation matter of dealing with an attorney who was ironically had done workplace issue law and he got hit with a sexual harassment case. It was super graphic like this guy, he got divorced, it was super public, it was really bad. And you have the same thing you have, they’re people embezzlement, you have, there’re workplace violence, we have to be aware of what do you do? And those are all things that can happen and that are out of your control and you just have to react to them

Karin Conroy:

Because on top of just being a business, you are also part of a bar association. You have ethical violations. These are things that not every business necessarily has to be aware of or pay attention to is the ethics and your bar association. Sometimes I could see doctors having their bars and things like that where they have levels of policing. But when it comes to a crisis for a law firm, what are the kinds of things that you think may be different or maybe they’re all the same that they need to think through specifically to be prepared for and just be thinking about?

John P. David:

Well, I think there’s a couple of things. So what you’re getting at is regulatory, right? So there’s a difference between, listen, I could go take a drive and get a speeding ticket and I’d be mad, but if I’m a lawyer and I get a speeding ticket, I broke the law. So now I have to deal with theBar association or something. I mean, it depends on how fast you’re going with the speed

Karin Conroy:

Limit. Speed Limit or whatever.

John P. David:

The point is that you have a license, and I’m not a lawyer and I always tell people when I’m dealing with PR matters or I’m not a lawyer, and then I also remind, I don’t have a law license to protect. So if you’re an attorney and you’re in the public realm, you have a law license to protect. I mean, but a crisis can be anything. All of a sudden, if you law firm has a very well regarded securities law practice and then the top five lawyers in that group decide to go to another law firm, you have a crisis on your hands, you have a communications issue on your hands, you have a problem because a whole bunch of top people are now going somewhere else. If I’m the current client and that’s the group that I’m most interested in, or that’s the group that I use, do I stay with you or do I go with them? Because guess what, they’re calling me and saying they’re going, so should I go with them?

Karin Conroy:

Oh my gosh, let’s go down this road a little bit because I see this all the time. I can’t tell you the number of clients I’ve got where they contact me. And I even had one time where it was like they wouldn’t give me their real name and they were like, this is going to happen in the dark of night and we will give you the real name. Once a certain number of things have happened and we’re leaving, what I’m talking about is people leaving a firm where they know it’s going to be a crisis and they’re planning for that. And so what you’re describing, it happens all the time. If you’ve been a lawyer for more than five minutes, you’ve seen this happen. And at big firms it’s being planned now and it probably won’t happen until some future date, but they’re contacting marketing companies like me and they’re already making these plans. So let’s talk through that because what is the messaging and communication strategy look like when something like that happens? Let’s assume we’re talking to the firm that is being left. So you’ve got a bunch of your partners all of a sudden left and these are your big names and they’ve just left and they’re starting their own thing and your clients are probably big clients and they’re going, what is happening?

John P. David:

Yeah, I know it is a nightmare, right? Part of this is that you have to think about, alright, who are your audiences? And it goes back to that whole thing of let’s make sure we can reach everybody. And there’s an old TV commercial, I forget what the brand was, but it was about this company where they were losing touch with their clients and they were just calling and faxing and there was some company meeting and the CEO was handing airplane tickets back when we used to have airplane tickets. He was handing out to these salespeople going, you’re going to Chicago, you’re going to la, you’re going here. I’m going to see our largest customer in Sioux Falls. So the first thing is you have to be able to reach out to your clients. So you have to have a plan in place, alright, who’s going to be the person who’s going to call? Who’s going to do this? What’s our messaging going to be? And then if it becomes public, then what are we going to say about it? And the message might be, listen, we had a robust securities practice before these guys and these gals ever got here and we’re, they’re going to have one in the future or whatever. You have to come up with that messaging. I think you really sit there and it’s all about

Karin Conroy:

Audience.

John P. David:

So in this case, the audience, there might be a potential client out there that you should be worrying about, but it’s your existing clients who can go with them. Lawyers don’t do non-competes,

So they don’t have that. So you can go with anybody you want. And so it’s Jerry McGuire getting beginning of Jerry McGuire. It’s like they start fighting for the clients and they’re calling all the clients and he’s calling all the clients and who’s with me and he’s got his fish and all that. You can prepare for those things by having plan in place and just saying, game it out a little bit. Okay, what’s the worst thing that could happen? And it should be everything from what do we do if the building gets shut down for some reason it’s out of our control. There’s a fire on the 35th Floor to what do we do if we have a major defection? What if we do, if somebody passes whatever, somebody’s on vacation, whitewater rafting and they don’t come back, those types of things can happen and they can really damage the business.

Karin Conroy:

Well, and to be honest, you’re lawyers. You are all a group of lawyers. This is your job is to plan and prepare for risk and these potential outcomes that may or may not happen. Obviously you’re not an insurance company, but when I put together the contracts for my agreements, it’s all about the potential for X, Y, and Z to happen. And so this is what we’re talking about. There’s all this potential that these things might happen. Let’s put a plan in place so that if something like that comes up, we’ve kind of thought it through and we have a plan. And the next question I wanted to ask is about how your philosophy around how many people should be talking. So basically is there a single point of contact and if not why?

John P. David:

I think the answer, I think the answer.

Karin Conroy:

I kind of teed that one up.

John P. David:

Yeah. Yeah. I think the answer for half a second, back to your first question, the contract, so every clause and every contract came from something that went wrong once before.

Karin Conroy:

Yes,

John P. David:

Exactly. So that’s to think about. It’s true

Karin Conroy:

Because when I was a baby doing all of this and I first started out, my contract was like two paragraphs long. Right Now over time I work with lawyers and so this thing came up. Okay, got to throw that in there too. And so now it’s much longer.

John P. David:

That’s right, that’s right. One voice, single point of contact, one set of messaging. It’s always important to have multiple sets of eyes on things so that you get varied opinions on what you’re saying, but you definitely want, this is our message, this is what we have to say. And you can have more than one person kind of distributing that information, but it should all be the same thing. And that’s absolutely critical because you just end up, you get disinformation, misinformation, mixed messaging, all those things, And it’s the last thing you’re trying to do. Again, you’re trying to, in the stuff we’ve been kind of gaming out here, you’re trying to rebuild credibility and you don’t rebuild credibility by having mixed messages. So yeah, absolutely.

Karin Conroy:

I feel like that it goes back to just basically one of my main philosophies in marketing in general is that there should be one point of contact who is kind of the decision maker, and even when we’re doing marketing projects that aren’t in a crisis, but even in those moments, you have the time and the space to make the right decisions, but when you have too many cooks in the kitchen, this is when the projects fall apart and it doesn’t become better. It never becomes better when you have 20 people dissecting one single sentence. I can’t tell you how often I am dealing with this on really a daily basis when we’re doing projects and all of a sudden I have one main point of contact, but then all of a sudden that person doesn’t actually have the decision power, and so then they send it up the chain and then everything gets derailed. This needs to be decided first of all, before any project starts, but also before any crisis arises so that it doesn’t become this just muddy, messy disaster that I feel is where most things fall apart.

John P. David:

Well, I got one for you. So have you ever heard of the definition of a camel? Oh yeah,

Exactly. C, it’s a horse designed by committee. I’ve done news releases for companies and sometimes with lawyers, sometimes without lawyers, and I’ve read a news release and it comes back and it’s been changed 10 different times and I say, listen, you got a camel, right? I mean this is no longer an efficient piece of communication in a crisis. It’s really critical that you have, someone’s going to sign off on this, so you have to say, okay, if it’s going to be the managing partner is going to be the one who signs off on this. I had it happen with me. One of my clients there in the real estate industry, they had a project and there was a crisis and the local TV was there and they’re like, we’re going the news in an hour and a half. I can take a statement up until 20 minutes before air. And so you have to get a statement to them before that time, otherwise it’s not going to be on the air. And so you don’t get to decide the timing is being decided for you, and so make the call, someone’s got to make the decision and decide here’s what we’re going to say, which is usually the PR person’s job in conjunction with this client. And then it’s like, guess what? It’s got to be done and I’m going to call you 10 minutes beforehand and five minutes beforehand and then we’re going to get it signed off on. Then we’re going to get it to the person.

Karin Conroy:

In that description, you were obviously put the PR person in that role because we were talking about how important it is to have the right person in the right role and hire an expert when you need an expert. But I feel like this conversation is really just alluding to the structure of your business, whether you and the people in your company have trust and faith in each other because if you feel like there’s this whole design by committee that has to happen, there’s something there happening that is not really respecting the structure of the company, so this is what needs to happen ahead of time, this is where you need to take that step back and say, okay, is there somebody who is in a role that either shouldn’t be or we need to pull in an expert to do this, and if so, we need to address that now before something else comes up. Do you want to talk for a minute about just your philosophy on hiring the right person and not putting some random person in?

John P. David:

Well, I mean part of it is that, like I said, most of the time if you’re in a crisis, you really want to hire somebody who you have confidence in that it helps if you know ’em a little bit, but there’s a lot of advantages to having a third party person, like a PR person involved, and I actually jotted that down. So before you’re talking, And so one of them is, I mean obviously is that you lawyers look at things from a legal perspective and sometimes it’s reputational. There’s nothing the lawyer can do. If this thing is being tried in the court of public opinion, there’s no lawyering that can fix it, right? That’s number one. So if it rises above what the lawyers can do, then you need to start looking at it from this reputational PR aspect of it

Karin Conroy:

All, whether it’s your client’s issue or your issue. If it’s an issue that we’re talking about where they’ve kind of said something in social media or you were describing before we started recording, maybe there’s something happening in a local town council or maybe it’s something political or maybe there’s an ethical issue or one way or the other. It’s not something that you can just write a legal letter and sue somebody and it’s going to go away all of a sudden. I know another example, review and reputation management, we can talk about that for a minute. I know you have a list, but reviews and your reputation, that shows up in reviews. That’s another major part of this.

John P. David:

Yeah, I wrote a book about all that stuff, but when it comes to the third party is that obviously a PR person does crisis work, they have experience doing this, they’ve seen these things before, and so experience specifically in messaging and what happens are guilty of this is that they’re wordy, they say have a lot to say, and sometimes one of the things that happens is that when you send out a statement during a crisis, you don’t get to choose exactly what is used. So I often look at this and say, okay, we’re going to do a very short statement. It might be three sentences, but all three of those sentences actually have to be able to live on their own. The media may just grab one part of it,

Karin Conroy:

And

John P. David:

So you have to sit there and think strategically about that, that a PR person can be the go-between most of the time, I don’t know all the details. I always call reporters and say, I hear you’re covering this. I’m on the case. I’ve been on the case for eight minutes, so I’m trying to help. I just want you to know we’re working on it. And then they usually tell me what’s going on. I speak the language and I’m saying, when I say, when’s your deadline? What’s your angle here? If you really believe this, sometimes it’s not believable. And then you can kind triage it. You have a third party doing it who’s not, and then who also, and the last thing is, like I said, sort of knows the rules, knows what on the record, off the record on background, all those things mean. But also they also understand you can have a conversation with a reporter and be helpful to them and still not give them a statement and it won’t say no comment. It’ll just be basically you can try to be helpful but not necessarily be on the record. There’s things you can do to do that. I think that that’s the important part of having a third party if things escalate. Well,

Karin Conroy:

And even from the lawyer’s perspective, if you’re thinking about how you represent a client, you are that neutral party and you don’t have the emotional connection either. So if you as a lawyer get on a call with a reporter and they say something kind of inflammatory because trying to get this statement out of you and you take it kind of personally and have this impulsive reaction and say something emotional, you better believe they’re going to use that and it’s going to just get worse. Whereas if it’s your PR rep and they’re having that conversation, they don’t have that emotional connection, and so they’re not going to be triggered by some stupid thing that a reporter tries to inflame them with. Theres that piece of it too.

John P. David:

Absolutely. No, there’s a bit of an art to dealing with the media. You can screw it up. There’s no doubt. You can absolutely screw it up. And so there’s many instances of that.

Karin Conroy:

I keep thinking about that book that I was reading and how the detective kept getting cornered by this reporter, and I just keep picturing that scene. I feel like it’s a good segue into the book review section, so it’s time for the Leaders library. Our website has a curated collection of the top book picks from all of our guests. So John, what is the one book that you think everybody should have on their bookshelf?

John P. David:

We kind of talked about this a little bit beforehand, so it’s like I wrote a business book, it’s called How to Protect or Destroy Your Reputation Online. It’s Published in 2016. It was really the early days of dealing with online issues. Many of the lessons are still valid today. The other side is that my personal reading time is all in my particular genre, like the mystery, thriller genre, whatever, aspiring slash failed novelist. And so that’s my area, but my recommendation for anybody who’s looking for something fun and interesting to read is the whole Thursday murder club series. I think there’s four books out now.

Karin Conroy:

Who is that?

John P. David:

Richard Osman, British guy, and it’s basically set in what we would call a nursing home, like a nursing home in England,

There’s retired spy and a bunch of retired, they’re called them pensioners in the uk, and they have set up their own. They started trying to solve local cold cases as their hobby, but then it turned into this whole thing.

Karin Conroy:

Like a real thing.

John P. David:

Yeah, no, and there’s actual people actually get bumped off and all that stuff. Richard Oman, he’s a television presenter in the uk, pretty famous, but the first book was optioned by, I believe it was Optioned by Steven Spielberg.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, nice. So

John P. David:

Someday there will be a movie.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, that sounds kind of fun, but a good compelling read. But I do feel like it kind of ties back into this whole murder mystery thing that we keep talking about in terms of PR and making sure that you are prepared and you don’t get cornered, really.

John P. David:

No, absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing. Like I said, the idea of journalists and traditional journalists, they don’t always play by the rules, don’t always. Sometimes the number of times where I’ve read articles where they’ve said the company could not be reached for comment, I’m like, well, they didn’t try very hard because we’ve got our phone numbers are everywhere, and they didn’t call us, so they’re somebody just decided that they going to say that ignoring the problems never solves them. There are certainly situations where maybe something happens online and you get a nasty thing on Twitter and you look at it and it’s someone who looks sort of like a crazy person who has 200 followers. You’re not going to respond to it, but you might keep your eye on it.

Karin Conroy:

Sure, yeah. I feel like there was the three big things that I wrote down from I think your website about protecting your reputation in terms of do you want to cover those? Yes.

John P. David:

Preparation is key, speed is critical, and silence can be deadly.

Karin Conroy:

Yes, I feel like this is key for marketing, but of course in a crisis where you feel like your hair is on fire, where I see this more often is when websites get hacked. This happens more and more. It’s frequent. We’ve had cybersecurity experts on that say, it has nothing to do with you, it has nothing to do with your website. It’s the fact of the internet. Now your website is likely to be hacked,

John P. David:

So

Karin Conroy:

The idea that you’re not prepared is ridiculous. You need to prepare for that. So prepare for a crisis and then hopefully it doesn’t happen and you’re great. Speed is critical. Once again, if your website is hacked, don’t let it sit there for a week or a month. It’s really bad. And then also silence is deadly. If you do have a website hack or a data breach or any kind of PR crisis, you got to make a statement and you’ve got to get out in front of it, and you don’t want your clients to be landing on a website that has some flag of a different foreign country and it’s saying very questionable things and not at least make a statement about it. I feel like that’s a really good takeaway. It’s just about preparing and in the legal industry, that’s sort of your deal, so this should feel comfortable.

John P. David:

Yeah, I know I have a client who was suing her law firm because she believed that they should have been watching out for her, and she ended up having a huge, she thought that her lawyers should have told her what to look out for. And so you’re a hundred percent correct, particularly lawyers who do regulatory stuff, they should probably be down to do the basics of a crisis communications plan.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. Awesome. Alright, so John, what’s one thing that works?

John P. David:

One thing that I know in a crisis is that it’s always great to have someone who kind of speaks the language of the media, Who inderstands what’s motivating them, how they operate, because playing the game the way that they’re expecting it, if you go and you try to strong arm the media, it’s not going to work it. You go and try to BS ’em, it’s not going to work. But if you go and speak their language, then it’s pretty amazing what you can get sometimes. Sometimes I’ve been very proud of myself, quite honestly, for making things kind of disappear

Karin Conroy:

Nice.

John P. David:

And I didn’t do anything magical. The reality was is there was no big story there, but if you can explain it in the terms that these reporters understand, then they’ll go, you’re right. There isn’t a story here. Or they may actually take it back. They’ll never say, you’re right back away. This is not going to be the next Watergate, the next career changing story. It’s just something happened and nearly as bad as you think. It’s so having somebody who kind of speaks the language that always works.

Karin Conroy:

I also am imagining a natural disaster, and in most cases, this is not going to be the scenario, but imagine it is the hurricane that describing and you’re trying to pack up your house. There’s a hurricane bearing down on the last thing you want to be doing is Googling how to do your best case scenario is to get the right person in place where basically they’re going to sort of put up their arms and push the hurricane back and say, this is not really a hurricane, it’s just a rainstorm. It’s not so bad. Or maybe it’s not even raining at all, but they know how to do it in a way that you don’t have time to do for yourself, and nor do you have the expertise. And this is why your clients come to you too. They come to you to kind of push that hurricane back. They don’t want your clients to be Googling how to be a lawyer. So for the same reason, you should not be Googling how to do your own PR or even thinking that’s the right answer whether you’re Googling it or not.

John P. David:

And the other issue is, like I said when we were talking beforehand, a lot of attorneys think because they know the local reporter that they’ll call and talk to the local reporter and they’re really in the end, I’ve had that scenario and a lawyer very kind of hot, at least say to me, well, I called so-and-so myself, and the next day there was a story in the paper. And I said, yeah, but you also alienated everybody else. You made it worse. We could have gotten story. We got a story in this publication, but we could have gotten it in three other places if we sent it to all of ’em at the same time, because you sent it to first, they don’t want do it now. We kind of paused and looked at me and he goes, you’re right. And then at the same time, like I said, all of a sudden the lawyers are acting like PR people

Karin Conroy:

And

John P. David:

That’s not cost effective for their clients.

Karin Conroy:

No, it’s not a good move. John P. David is the president of David PR Group. Thank you so much for being here. I feel like this was good quality, like useful, and hopefully it saves a few buts, really, people rethink how they need to think about it to begin with. So thank you for being here.

John P. David:

Absolutely. Thank you, Karin. It was great, really in speaking with you. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Counsel Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at Counsel Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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