- Lawyers to be media savvy and to have strategies in place for protecting clients both during and after a trial.
Colin Stagg, falsely accused in 1992 of murdering Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, spent a year in custody before being found not guilty in 1994. Last year, he revealed in a newspaper interview how false perceptions of his guilt have dogged him ever since, making him unemployable.
Matt Bosworth, who was a clerk at the time at Russell-Cooke, the firm which represented Stagg, says he was ‘able to see how the mass media went to work on a character assassination’. Stagg’s predicament, however, occurred pre-internet and pre-social media. Bosworth, now a partner at Russell-Cooke, says social media has made it even more important for lawyers to be media savvy and to have strategies in place for protecting clients both during and after a trial.
Who’s publishing?
Back then, Bosworth explains, it was possible to ‘know the people you were dealing with in various editorial and in-house
