5 Concepts That Will Ruin Your Litigation PR Campaign

When a brand or individual is involved in a legal battle, a pragmatic approach would be most suitable for a client to safeguard their reputation.

Litigation PR professionals must observe some simple yet lifesaving concepts to increase their client’s chances of success.

Here are five simple concepts that litigation PR pros can ignore at their peril.

Adhering to the rules of engagement

Court rules cannot be bent when conducting litigation PR. Professionals that have tried to outsmart set rules and guidelines have received the contempt of court verdict. Contempt of court verdict introduces complications in a client’s case: it may hinder a PR professional’s ability to deliver exceptional services. 

Litigation PR professionals must know when to speak about different aspects of the case, and when to release different documents to the public.

Adhering to simple guidelines can make or break a client’s chances of safeguarding their reputation through the courts.

Timelines

With the sea of newsworthy stories competing for headlines within the media, observing timelines can skyrocket your chances of featuring a client’s story in top media outlets.

A unique strategy to standing out is engaging key journalists via background briefings.

Not only do background briefings allow for nurturing relationships, but they also help journalists have a deeper understanding of a lawsuit.

Through background briefings and working with court timelines, journalists can publish in-depth stories on top media outlets. This enables a client to generate the required publicity and control the direction of a narrative.

Know your audience

To increase the effectiveness of litigation PR, communication professionals should assess and familiarize themselves with publications and their audience before pitching a client’s story.

At the same time, PR professionals should know the publication’s deadlines and most appropriate times to reach out with a client’s story.

PR pros should target publications that allow law and litigation stories. Such publications enable a client’s story to achieve the required publicity by targeting an audience that’s savvy with litigation processes.

When pitching stories via email, legal PRs should include unique subject lines to pique journalists’ attention. This way, journalists will open and read a story the moment they receive it.

Ensure you have a high-quality story

Journalists can identify a story that can move an audience quite easily. Hence, legal PR professionals should identify unique features that make stories go viral.

Particularly, litigation PR pros should often include short, insightful and quotable comments that can help move a story and explain the wider implications of the specific case.

Litigation stories should get to the point quickly while remaining interesting and maintaining an original perspective.

To ensure that litigation stories jump off the page, PR professionals should steer away from unnecessary legal jargon or opinions.

Avoid complex and meaningless phrases

Legal PR professionals should adopt plain English to convey a client’s story. To simplify journalists’ work and increase the chances of a client’s story being featured, litigation PR pros should simplify their stories.

This will get client stories featured in top publications, but will also enable litigation PR professionals to nurture relationships with top journalists, thus, improving the success rate of their PR activities.