Clienting #32: Wayne Pollock on PR for Lawyers

Clienting: Digital Legal Marketing

Wayne Pollock is the founder and managing attorney of Copo Strategies (www.copostrategies.com), a national legal services and communications firm. Wayne helps other attorneys and their clients ethically, strategically, and proactively engage the Court of Public Opinion to help those clients resolve their legal disputes favorably, and to help those attorneys build their practices. Serving as a consultant to law firms or as limited scope co-counsel to clients, Wayne's counsel incorporates legal strategy, media strategy, ethics compliance, and defamation avoidance.

How to get your message out in the court of public opinion. The public, your clients, and the media are not digging through court files so how do you get your client's story out of the courtroom? The answer: PR

Ethics of PR:

• Model Rule 1.6- not disclosing case or client information publicly;
• Ethics Opinion 480- must have client permission to publicly reveal any case-related information publicly
• Rule 3.6: Trial Publicity, cannot make statements outside of court that could prejudice a case.
  • (6 months has been ruled as enough time between media coverage and the case for the public to forget about the case).

Protecting your clients (from themselves). Litigation strategy and PR strategy run parallel to one another.

PR in the modern era of search engines- how to navigate technology ahead of the law.

Who needs PR? Criminal Defense, Trial Lawyers, Real Estate, or any other litigator that has or uses public documents.

How to work with reporters:

• Create a reporter relationship,
• Connect with reporters and use comments or the media to your advantage
• Greg Siskind's reporter outreach via Twitter
• Help A Reporter Out

PR = phone calls, inquiries. They may not be clients but you can be an advocate for your practice area. Position yourself as an expert in your field and practice area.

PR + SEO = opinion summaries are a great way to get links, traffic and more.

Find reporters in your area, likely to cover your practice area. Email them and introduce yourself; who you are, what you do, and how you can help the reporter.

Lawyers have a PR problem and the public perception is often negative.