One-stop shop for panicking clients

What is a crisis? Would you recognize one if you were in it and what type of legal help would you seek? It’s worth considering a few examples: a team member in IT is told that a laptop has been left on a train. An employee calls a whistleblowing hotline to disclose that she has been bullied. The CEO has been charged with drink-driving. Accounts discover that a £10,000 payment has not been received. A school calls a parent to say that a child has been involved in unsuitable messaging. A journalist emails with a warning of an imminent adverse article.

These may seem to be entirely different scenarios, but they all have some important common elements. We describe a crisis as an unplanned, unpredictable situation which has the power to impact you or your business’s performance and reputation in a severe way, as well as both personal and professional relationships. It is often a once-in-a-lifetime experience and can push even the most experienced lawyers and professionals beyond their comfort zone.

Office crisis

In a corporate environment, one of the challenges of a crisis is that the issue can arise in any part of a business and with any level of employee. It takes someone to spot that the situation might pose a risk. It might seem self-contained or even trivial at the outset, but it takes a particular type of pessimist to foresee all the ways in which that situation might escalate or deteriorate. It then requires someone to raise a shout for help, to escalate the problem (and to the right person) and assess whether it’s serious or not. We call this phase triage. The outcome of triage might be to identify whether there are legal issues, but it may be hard to know what exactly these issues are within the first few hours.

Personal drama

If the crisis is of a personal nature, it can be hard to know where to turn as relatively few individuals have a personal lawyer on call. Even those high-net-worth clients with the benefit of a family office may not have encountered a personal crisis before. If you are buying a house or want to write your will, it is usually easy to navigate to a lawyer that offers those services. Historically it was perhaps less easy to find your way to someone who can help with an ill-defined risk, requiring a combination of skills. The client knows that something bad is clearly happening, but quite what that might be and what legal advice is needed is unlikely to be clear.

A new legal specialism

However, law firms have evolved in recent years to package together blended legal skills to cover all kinds of crisis and to market crisis management services as a distinct specialism. In the last few years Chambers and Partners, the research firm that produces rankings of law firms, has featured a dedicated Crisis and Risk Management Guide. According to its website, the firm rankings in its 2024 guide have increased by 10% year-on-year and individuals rankings increased by 47% year-on-year, reflecting the growth of this as a distinct practice area. A crisis management team typically brings together knowledge of employment law, fraud and white-collar crime, regulatory and governance, data protection and reputation—there are not many firms with expertise in all of these areas, even more so when a global perspective is required.

Well-advised clients in a crisis need to hear all the options and quickly. A key role of the crisis management lawyer will be recognizing in the first few hours what expertise is likely to be needed. Crisis managers are good builders of teams and the best should ‘bolt on’ to skills or knowledge that the client already possesses. Some of the advice will be legal, but it might often include other specialist skills such as forensic IT, investigators and communications. The crisis management lawyers’ little black book of handy people is invaluable.

The lawyers and the communicators should be allies in a crisis. What is being said must be 100% accurate in case it becomes evidence in subsequent litigation. There’s no place for speculation. This must be combined with sensitivity in how, when and to whom to communicate those facts.

With the right people around the table, the crisis might already seem more controllable. 

First published by New Law Journal.