Guideposts for aligning your legal strategy and crisis response

When you’re managing a crisis, it’s important to include a communications strategy with your legal plan.

PR pros and legal experts often find themselves at loggerheads over what to disclose, what to address publicly and what to keep close to the vest. For PR pros looking to convince lawyers and leadership teams, it’s helpful to rely on certain guidelines.

Here are eight essential guideposts:

1. Risk intelligence is the new enterprise risk management. In order to respond ASAP, you must know ASAP what you’ll have to respond to. To that end, the legal and/or crisis team should have regular access to risk experts who deploy the most efficient technology in order to monitor digital and social media mentions and to develop risk maps.

2. Teams. When the phone rings at 4 a.m., it’s seldom good news. From the moment a company is alerted to a crisis through the moment it finally fades from view, decisions are required at the speed of the crisis, not at the speed of decisions based on fact-gathering or discussions of legal exposure. Yes, information is as crucial as we have suggested, yet you will still have to make decisions about issues that the public deems critical—even before you’ve gathered all the facts.