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Key Takeaways Your PR communications team is focused on protecting your company’s reputation in the court of public opinion.
Your PR legal team is focused on protecting your interests in a court of law.
During a PR crisis, you need both teams working in tandem to most effectively manage the situation and keep your brand image intact.
In the world of public opinion, information (and, it should be noted, not always accurate information) moves fast. Like, lightning fast. But the world of law? Not so much. When your company takes a reputation-threatening hit, your communications team might indeed be able to react swiftly and strategically to grab hold of the narrative.
But the lawyers in your corner are playing on a whole different ball team — one that is situated in a courtroom instead of a newsroom, one that moves at a markedly slower pace and one that’s geared toward the long term over short-term outcomes.
And yet you’ll need both perspectives to get you out of a jam: the agile skills of a communications specialist and the litigation tactics of a savvy lawyer. In a time of crisis, therefore, it’s essential to have both sides aligned, not in spite of their differing focus points and time frames, but because of them.
Related: What Are the Best PR Tactics to Handle a Crisis?
What you need comms for
Think of your image handlers — whether that’s an internal PR staff, an external PR firm, or yourself sitting at your desk — as being on the offense for you. The communications you make public about your company, especially when they’re crisis communications, aim to get ahead of the problem and gain control of the story being told about you by ensuring that you’re the storyteller. Not some stranger on Insta or TikTok.
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