Lena Ahad explains how legal professionals can be more effective at communicating during adverse business conditions
Business crises can range from tax evasion, leaked information about employee layoffs, misconduct by senior staff, allegation of corruption or a troubled M&A—the list goes on. Recent high profile examples include the tax avoidance scandals of Google, Amazon and Starbucks, and the horsemeat scandal that hit many of the major supermarkets. Closer to home, in the legal sector, as many as 173 law firms were investigated in 2014 for a variety of incidents relating to the Data Protection Act (according to figures released by Egress Software Technologies following an FOI request to the Information Commissioner’s Office).
Traditional ways of working call for a series of internal meetings to talk through the incident, followed by a process of gathering the evidence to develop a suitable response which is checked and double checked by senior management. However, according to the Freshfields Bruckhaus Derringer LLP 2013 survey Containing a Crisis , of senior crisis communications professionals from 12 countries across the UK, Europe, Asia and the US, “more than one-quarter of crises
