The thick of it – a brief history of legal PR

For 20 years now the (mainly) thankless role of the legal PR has put the comms professional between demanding and sometimes deluded partners and a restless media. Legal Business canvasses the men and women trying to bring order to the chaos

He had been pacing the streets for hours, his path taking him from an unglamorous enclave of the City to Farringdon. Not aimless pacing – it was anything but – the PR man knew there was a prominent story appearing the following day regarding the large City law firm that he worked for. Knowing this, he was sick to his stomach about the slant put on the news, and what sort of reception he would get from the many partners he had to answer to. His hope was to locate the journalist that had written the story, buy him a drink and hopefully glean some details on the story to gauge how bad the damage would be.

Welcome to the life of the legal PR, the little-illuminated community in which put-upon comms professionals work to promote the image and business of their employing law firms, and – more stressfully – manage bad news when it breaks.

This breed of women and men are seldom officially discussed – though there are more than 200 working in-house at major law firms in the UK alone. But there is little doubt that, for better or worse, the more effective members of the legal PR tribe have a considerable role in shaping perceptions of large law firms.

Indeed, the City is home to the most sophisticated practitioners of PR in the global legal industry, with experienced hands that have been shaped by London’s competitive media environment – home to a plethora of national and business media and an energetic legal press. Manhattan’s better paid equivalents – who in comparison rely far more on the twin shields of e-mail communication and ‘no comment’ responses – don’t come close.

Yet the difficulty of measuring the contribution of PR, of course, has made it hard for the better professionals to gain their due. In addition, PRs in law firms have to wrestle with the peculiarly diffused governance structure and rigid hierarchies of a partnership, a very different proposition to serving a clear leadership team in many companies.

And even if you become one of the select band to achieve a significant position of authority and respect within a major law firm – the nature of the job means that an impossible-to-predict storm can imperil that hard-earned internal capital in the space of 24 hours.

As Tom Rose, head of communications at Herbert Smith Freehills, observes: ‘It takes time to build up relationships with partners. One of the inevitable stress points is the potential damage that a single bad story can do to these relationships and any reputation you might have.’

A brief history of legal PR

Claims that the legal profession lacks the sophistication of other industries are usually exaggerated but in the field of modern communications strategy, it is undoubtedly true. For this there were a number of obvious reasons. For one, it was not until 1987 that the ban on law firm advertising and marketing was lifted by the Law Society. And during this period the profession was far more fragmented and smaller in scale than the legal industry today. In the early 1990s, the top 100 largest UK law firms employed around 20,000 solicitors, against nearly 60,000 currently, while only the Magic Circle and Lovell White Durrant were then generating more than £100m annually.

But a rapid period of consolidation, growth and international expansion through the 1990s created a new demand for communications in the legal industry, however grudgingly adopted by many partners.

Linda Phelan was one of the first professional marketeers to be employed by a law firm in 1988, at Titmuss, Sainer & Webb, now part of Dechert. By all accounts the initial attempts of PR and marketing staff to bring their trade to the legal profession was anything but smooth.

Another ground-floor entrant at Titmuss Sainer was Clare Rodway, now the managing director of PR agency Kysen. Rodway recalls that, in the late 1980s, the average life expectancy of an in-house PR at a firm was nine months: ‘They’d hire people with high profiles and they’d come into partnerships and realise that they had no power as the only people with any power are equity partners.’

Chris Hinze, head of corporate communications at Hogan Lovells, says that in the early days law firms generally found it impossible to distinguish between publicity and the use of PR teams. His first jobs for law firms were restricted to producing brochures and not really fulfilling the function PR has today.

Still, there were many forces prodding law firms to ‘do’ PR properly as a two-way engagement rather than churning out promotional material. Notably, the dramatic ascent of Clifford Chance (CC) following the 1987 merger of Clifford Turner and Coward Chance gave the sense that an English law firm could capture the imagination and headlines with its ambition to build a truly global law firm. This development was further highlighted by the launch of the major legal titles and directories.

For many, it was CC’s press spokesman during much of this period, Tom Rose, who came to define the role and set the tone to which others aspired. Rose was effective in dealing with and mediating with journalists – who generally warmed to his ultra-dry sense of humour. Rose would have plenty of chances to deploy his skills managing communications as CC’s startling strategic expansion – and occasional internal dramas – unfolded through the 1990s.

This was by no means common at major City firms. Allen & Overy (A&O)’s Oliver Pykett and Gita Bartlett at Linklaters were to both achieve significant internal roles by the early 2000s but many of the most storied City advisers were content to largely rest on the brand or churn out ego-stroking deal releases.

But other changes in the industry were encouraging the upper echelons of the legal profession to raise their PR game. In particular, the emergence of a new band of ambitious regional and national players with designs on the City delivered a boost to the status of PR professionals.

Unlike complacent City rivals, these firms were hungry, ambitious and generally bought into the need for effective communications strategy. This breed was typified by Dibb Lupton Alsop, Hammond Suddards, Eversheds and Wragge & Co, firms that were determined to learn from the slick PR teams that the large accountancy firms had put in place during the 1980s.

This dynamic was supported by a then robust regional press, in which the professional services hubs in Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester were covered by strong business desks on papers like the Birmingham Post and the Yorkshire Evening Post.

While City firms remained conflicted about PR, the nationals’ marketing offensive was aided by the efforts of press-friendly leaders such as Dibbs’ Nigel Knowles, Wragges’ John Crabtree and Chris Jones at Hammonds.

But even if some law firms ‘got’ the benefits of PR, the majority of firms were still basically mystified by the concept of being written about as the meat of a story rather than a peripheral pundit.

And sometimes the misfires came due to partners’ enthusiasm for seeking out publicity, such as the profile of Ashurst finance partner Stephen Mostyn-Williams, which included a picture of him in the swimming pool.

In a less sanitised and politically correct age, individual partners sometimes made the headlines for a wide range of morally adventurous behaviour. One uproar surrounding a macho work culture and a sexualised ice sculpture at Edward Lewis was enough to contribute to the firm’s break up in 2000. CC also hit the headlines in 2002 after a partner took several journalists to a lap-dancing bar after a press reception.

This trend was underlined by the odd news genre of the e-mail leak, a popular media phenomenon that saw outlets traditionally content to entirely ignore law firms focus in considerable detail on salacious or surreal e-mails that had gone viral. Early subjects of this new genre were Norton Rose (a sex references e-mail); Baker & McKenzie (a dispute over dry cleaning) and Hammond Suddards (an ill-advised internal e-mail regarding a bizarre shoe fetish).

Throw in the rise of social media and the 2000 launch of RollOnFriday and law firms and their PRs were soon facing a much wider range of arenas in which stories could break.

All in all there was a mounting demand for skilled PRs in law firms, even if partners weren’t really sure what they wanted from their press strategy.

Daniela Conte, now senior communications manager at Simmons & Simmons, recalls that lawyers would once often threaten to sue publications for defamation after reading unflattering references to themselves in the press.

Other well established figures in this relatively young industry included Jo Shepherd, head of communications at Ashurst, and Imogen Lee, head of corporate communications at Eversheds. Shepherd was initially recruited by A&O to bolster its PR efforts, entering the legal field after working in comms in banking.

Lee, who joined Eversheds in 2001, says that law ‘used to be a closed shop and firms weren’t allowed to talk about anything they were doing’. Now not only does she discuss media strategies with her firm but also advises the firm’s clients.

If it was in the 1990s that legal PR first came of age, probably the clearest indication that it had carved out a defined role in the world of law came in 2001 when Herbert Smith recruited Rose from CC to some fanfare. With Herbert Smith intent on securing itself a position and reputation equivalent to London’s top firms, it was significant that recruiting CC’s primary spokesman was regarded as a symbolic step in achieving its ambitions.

Doing the job

Legal PRs enter the job through a number of fields, often having worked in marketing or PR for other industries or agencies or having worked in other areas of media like journalism. Entry-level pay at law firms is relatively generous by the standards of the communications industry, with junior entrants earning between £25,000 to £30,000, rising to over six figures for the most senior professionals.

For those going into PR, the consensus seems to be that you have to be extroverted, possess solid written and verbal communication skills and be good at building relationships. For obvious reasons, developing a reasonably thick skin comes in useful given the need to mediate between demanding journalists and even more demanding partners.

A quick mind is an asset given that the job requires dealing with knowledgeable partners across widely diversified practice lines and industry sectors. The most effective PRs soak up knowledge of their employing firms like a sponge and can use that insight as leverage to build relationships with the media.

But in reality the most important skills to getting anywhere in legal PR are an ability to read the power dynamics of a law firm partnership and find ways to build up internal capital within the institution.

Indeed, there has been a long line of PRs drafted in from other industries with big ideas of shaking up their firm’s comms strategy only to find partners have no intention of being told what to do, any more than a robustly independent press intends to be managed. Those that can’t quickly acclimatise to the singular environment of a legal partnership don’t last long.

As Hinze says: ‘If you can’t inspire some sort of confidence in the lawyers then you can’t work effectively.’ He adds that to be good at the job you have to have a real interest in the issues, a curiosity that many of the better operators display.

Liz Whitaker, who formerly ran Wragge & Co’s well-regarded media operation before setting up her own consultancy, Condor Communications, says: ‘You have to be the ultimate professional. They [partners] know they need you and you need them. My job is to be invisible and make it all happen, the spotlight should be on the partners you are working with.’

Whitaker’s comments illustrate one increasingly popular approach to PR that can be summed up in general as engagement. While early attempts at PR by law firms were focused on broadcasting the firm’s efforts through press releases on deals, directory submissions and brochures, soon larger firms evolved towards proactively managing dialogues and relationships with the media and outside parties. Many of the most experienced PRs see their role as to actively facilitate connections between the more media-friendly partners and relevant journalists rather than attempting to interpose themselves.

Norton Rose Fulbright’s Sean Twomey outlined what he argues are the five levels of media management in an article ‘Effective PR strategies for the successful law firm’ in the 2012 book, The Business of Law: Strategies for Success.

Twomey’s piece sets out a journey from the basics of compiling and broadcasting basic information towards proactively building advantageous relationships with the media and ultimately using these relationships in the context of campaigns aimed at strategically building the firm’s brand and revenues.

The piece also outlines the role of the PR in terms of supporting the partners to be more effective and confident in terms of dealing with the media. Twomey argues that 20% of a typical partnership will be ‘doves’, natural performers with the media who fully understand the role, ground rules and importance of using the media to build the brand and their practice.

That leaves a 10% of ‘hawks’, who strongly resist any kind of media role, while a clear majority of the partnership are ‘chickens’ – essentially neutral on the issue and in need of help and encouragement to be more comfortable with the media. A key task for the PR is to get the doves in front of relevant media and help support the silent majority to become more comfortable projecting the firm’s strengths. Twomey’s advice: forget the hawks.

This ‘facilitation’ approach is generally effectively used by many of the leading London law firms, though it is far less common in other major legal markets. Experimentation with a campaign-driven approach has also been increasingly evident in recent years, with firms such as A&O, Norton Rose Fulbright and Eversheds being particularly adept at the formula. Indeed, many have cottoned on to the ‘drop for Monday’ formula in which some of the less contact-driven newspapers fill out their Monday business sections with superficial research – a media approach heavily used by the major accountancy firms.

Eversheds’ Lee argues that PR should be increasingly moving beyond crude benchmarks such as number of placed articles, AVE (advertising value equivalent) or mentions of the brand to focus on bottom-line performance. ‘We are increasingly focusing on how the process can boost existing and new revenue streams.’ Lee says that one campaign driven by Eversheds’ comms team directly contributed to an additional £300,000 in fees.

With the largest firms running teams of six or seven PRs, the teams will focus on three distinct constituencies: the legal media, specialist industry press and generalist or national media. The three camps require fundamentally different handling, with the industry press being essentially regarded as a risk-free upside if you can get your partners in as talking heads. In comparison, the scrutiny of the legal media is a double-edged sword, since it moves the firms from pundits on the side to the core focus.

At times this leads to a combative relationship between legal titles and PRs. At Legal Week ten years ago, a storm in a tea cup was set off after erroneous reports spread among the gossipy PR community that the title had ‘banned’ its reporting staff from dealing with PRs entirely (the news editor had actually told reporters to clear office-hours meetings with press officers).

But ultimately, it remains a relationship-driven job on both sides and PRs generally socialise not only with many journalists covering the law but each other – as reflected in a well-attended annual Christmas party stuffed with journalists and London PRs.

Dealing with national media represents a challenge in that substantive coverage of the professional services industry is so patchy that law firms are often forced to resort to ‘riding the wave’ – putting forward pundits on issues in the headlines. While this can produce a crude ‘win’ and massage individual egos it rarely promotes the core of a corporate law firm’s business.

The internal PR is generally viewed as the primary resource and the best to advise management on operational and governance issues. However, many firms still use external agencies for discreet projects or campaigns and some areas of crisis management.

Nevertheless many larger law firms warn that generalist PR agencies, which can easily cost more than £100,000 annually for a basic scope retainer, are poor at day-to-day comms, lacking knowledge of the legal profession. Instead external PR works better when it is used with a tightly managed brief that the agency has relevant contacts in. There are also a handful of agencies with a specialist focus on the legal industry.

A seat at the table

It is clear that PR is more effective when the comms team is given some influence in shaping a firm’s communications strategy and helping to keep messages that the firm is putting out realistically grounded and credible. Some of that comes from being able to tell the firm awkward messages. As Conte says: ‘It’s not good PR practice to only tell management what they want to hear.’

Michael Evans, who worked at Herbert Smith before last year joining Baker & McKenzie, picks up the theme: ‘One of the most important things for a legal PR is to help the story the firm tells about itself both internally and to the outside world and keep that story grounded in reality. If the story the firm tells diverges too much from reality, you can get into really serious trouble.’

In essence, influence, respect and being privy to what is going on inside a law firm, underpins the ability of a senior PR to be effective. Without that mandate, a PR remains essentially a well-paid administrator with minimal impact.

And by far the most important element in securing that support is the relationship between senior management and the head of comms.

Despite the caricature of the ignored comms professional with no respect from partners, senior management at law firms quite often come to rely on their PR as an important adviser, though that fact is rarely advertised. Managing partners do not have the kind of clear executive mandate in place at most companies and so trade to a considerable extent on having up-to-date information to demonstrate to their partners that they are in control of events.

As such, helping to keep their bosses informed about what they need to know, including sensitive stories that may be breaking, is the most reliable means of gaining the internal capital needed to do the job. ‘In terms of relationships you have with lawyers you’ve got to be on the spectrum between good or at the least very workmanlike. You can’t afford to fall out with the big power brokers,’ says Rose.

As such probably the biggest concern of a PR is not avoidance of bad news – it is avoiding nasty surprises that undermine the position of both the PR (and by extension their ‘sponsoring’ managing partner).

‘I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve worked with managing partners who are of the view that communication, be it internally or to the wider market, is something that they see as important to the role and see it as important to the business,’ says Hinze.

Buoyed by such a strong relationship there are a handful of PRs who have achieved considerable influence, extending even to robustly prodding many of the partners when needed, at least those outside the ‘inner circle’ of opinion formers.

The opposite side of the equation is when management lacks people skills or the willingness to work with the media. One such incident saw a senior partner of a law firm launch a colourful outburst in an e-mail at this title’s editor-in-chief due to a decision not to run a story on one of the firm’s ventures (triggering a rushed PR damage litigation exercise and a letter of apology).

But such attitudes are extremely rare at a law firm of any size these days. In the main, the better PRs at the senior end of the profession get a sufficiently constructive working relationship with their senior management.

Bingham McCutchen London head James Roome comments: ‘A really good PR team is fantastic at organising and facilitating and really help the strategic discussion. I’m a big fan of them. They provide a hugely useful service but it’s very important they understand what they are there for and that the better they know the business the better they are. You have to be a hell of a smart person. The good ones know the business and are able to fit in some of the things you’re saying into a broader strategy and make sense of it.

‘[But] there’s nothing worse than a freestanding one who comes up to you and whispers that helpful comment in your ear then you find actually it’s got no relation to reality. Then they are a bloody menace.’

The nightmare scenario

Years of experience and a supportive managing partner go a long way but the real test for professionals comes not in promoting the firm’s efforts in a positive context but in managing the situation when things go wrong.

For all the attempts of major law firms to promote the image of cool-under-pressure international businesses, in reality law firms still tend to wobble under pressure, remaining prone to institutional panic or burying their head in the sand.

Former CC managing partner Peter Cornell later confessed that he at the time feared the ‘padding-gate’ coverage it received over an (actually fairly innocuous) associate memo in 2002 would actually bring down the Magic Circle firm.

Nevertheless, many PRs view managing such situations as an opportunity to build their reputation. Duncan Miller, public relations manager at Withers, is well placed to comment having worked as a PR at Dewey & LeBoeuf in the months preceding its spectacular implosion last year.

‘Dewey was a difficult time,’ recalls Miller. ‘The problem was that they didn’t want to take advice from the PR team. They didn’t have any interest in taking advice on how to mitigate anything in terms of press. All of these stories were going round and often it was the first I’d heard about it. Even the director of communications in the States didn’t know the half of it. Dewey is a lesson on how not to do things.’

However, Miller – who was a constructive and even-tempered operator during Dewey’s death spiral – feels having worked at the sharp end stood him in good stead in terms of his CV.

Hinze had a similar experience in a previous job, having worked at the now-defunct Andersen Legal, the legal network of big five accountant Arthur Andersen, which dramatically collapsed in 2002 after being caught up in the scandal regarding its auditing of Enron.

‘I had a good view of the collapse of Andersen that taught me that there are some days you can’t stop it, the situation will play out as it will. What we did in that circumstance was stop protecting the business and protect the individuals. It was part of a process of putting people in life boats,’ says Hinze.

Rose says that you have to avoid sharing any stress with partners and journalists: ‘You are there as a shock absorber. You don’t want emotions to get caught up.’

Not every attempt to work with stories pays off. A&O conducted a review of its internal communications after a Legal Business cover feature in 2005 focused on the firm’s governance and strategy. Norton Rose, meanwhile, stoked some controversy after it emerged that previously issued figures for its 2003/04 income overstated its income for that year by around £10m. A subsequent statement that such provided figures were only a ‘guideline’ was generally viewed as an own-goal.

On a separate note, PRs privately concede that their job on occasion involves steering a law firm away from pushing the envelope of truth in external statements. Says one veteran: ‘I’ve had conversations with our partners where they’ve been interviewed and they’ve said to me: “I didn’t say that [to a journalist].” And I’ve had to say: “Well actually, you did.”’

Another PR recalls a previous dispute with a Legal Business journalist over statements made by their firm: ‘You once called me a liar. Well I wasn’t a liar but I was working for one.’

In the vast majority of occasions, both PRs and partners are straight-dealers with the media – a basic integrity that rarely gets acknowledged. The consensus is that much of what a press spokesperson trades on is trust – without that trust from media contacts, the ability to mitigate damage or even ensure a fair hearing when bad news breaks quickly ebbs away.

Rodway, counsels a realistic view when dealing with the media. ‘I can’t be too cosy with journalists. Journalists need to challenge everything I say. The press are the thorn in the side, that’s what they’re supposed to do.’

As to where this game goes in the future, arguably it will be more of the same. Despite claims that PR will become more central in law, in general the size and sophistication of the legal marketing community hasn’t changed hugely since the early 2000s. In part this is a reflection of the tough economic times, though it seems notable that PR and marketing teams have largely escaped the job cuts, restructurings, outsourcings and near-shorings that have hit a swathe of back offices at law firms.

However, there has been an internationalisation of what was once a trade that existed largely in London and New York, pushing out across the world as major law firms continue to globalise.

It is likely that more firms will attempt to build on the kind of strategic, campaign-driven work that a number of law firms have begun executing. This is a delicate balance as moving too close to business development can easily turn into a turf war with far larger BD teams. As yet there is precious little evidence of corporate law firms’ PR teams getting to grips with social media – an area in which they are increasingly lagging behind the wider trends in the comms industry.

But it is also apparent that the modern profession has grown steadily more at ease with the concept of building a media profile and the role of their communications teams in helping achieve that goal. That is ultimately a considerable PR job in itself. LB

david.stevenson@legalease.co.uk