Bottom line: In high-profile legal matters, attorneys and their clients must be strategic about when they engage the Court of Public Opinion.
It is often said that in life, “timing is everything.” That saying applies with equal force to engaging the Court of Public Opinion.
When attorneys engage the Court of Public Opinion in connection with a client’s legal dispute, they often focus on what they’re going to say and who they’re going to say it to.
They frequently overlook the “when” of the engagement — When are they going to go to the Court of Public Opinion?
Don’t make that mistake.
Attorneys need to understand that the timing of going to the media and the public in connection with one of their cases has to be strategic and it has to be thought out in advance.
Attorneys must realize that the timing of going to the media regarding a particular development in a case almost always depends on the nature of that development.
If an attorney is going to the media regarding a case that he or she just filed, he or she is going to want to go to the media soon after filing that complaint. Preferably that same day, maybe within the next day or two. He or she should not go to the media a week later and tell them that they filed a complaint last week. By then, the news is almost certainly too stale to be published.
If an attorney is holding a press conference regarding a particular development in a client’s case, he or she is going to want to give target media outlets a couple days’ notice that the event is happening.
If an attorney is going to trial, he or she is going to want to talk to a reporter a week or two before trial starts. Attorneys shouldn’t dump documents onto a reporter the day before a trial and tell the reporter, “Oh, by the way, we’re in this particular courtroom starting at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow.”
The amount of lead time that an attorney gives to a reporter is going to depend on how much information the reporter needs to digest in order to get up to speed and report accurately and effectively on the development in a client’s case. Attorneys need to make sure that they are giving reporters time to digest the information so that they can report it.
Now, I want to tell you something that most attorneys don’t understand: The timing of going to the media will also impact an attorney’s legal strategy, and vice versa.
When an attorney is planning his or her Court of Public Opinion outreach, he or she should think about how this outreach can be timed so that the finished product comes out when it could be most impactful to the attorney’s case.
If an attorney knows that he or she has a mediation or an arbitration coming up, he or she should be thinking that it’d be helpful to have an article about the client’s case come out on the eve of, or during, that mediation or arbitration.
Same thing if an attorney is trying to get a reporter to write a long feature about the wrongdoing of an organization that the attorney is suing. That kind of article doesn’t come to fruition after a day or two of research. That article has to be researched and reported over the course of weeks, if not months. If an attorney is cognizant of that amount of necessary lead time, he or she can avoid waiting until a couple days before a big event in a client’s case to go to the media and try to get a reported story that will impact the case.
The “when” of going to the Court of Public Opinion, the timing of when attorneys go to the Court of Public Opinion, cannot be understated in terms of its importance.
Attorneys need to be thinking strategically about when they go to the Court of Public Opinion. If they are strategic about this timing, they will find that their outreach efforts will likely have a better chance of succeeding because they are giving reporters the appropriate amount of time to fully research and report on their clients’ cases. The more time reporters have to report an article about a legal dispute, the more likely such an article will be published.
Bottom line: In high-profile legal matters, attorneys and their clients must be strategic about when they engage the Court of Public Opinion.
Wayne Pollock is the founder and managing attorney of Copo Strategies in Philadelphia, a national legal services and communications firm. Attorneys and law firms enlist Copo Strategies to engage the media and the public regarding their clients’ cases (to help resolve those cases favorably), and to engage the media, referral sources, and prospective clients regarding their firms (to help bring new client matters in the door). Contact him at waynepollock@copostrategies.com or 215–454–2180.