Attorneys have more disdain for the media than any other group of professionals I can think of.
“Don’t talk,” they tell their clients who have just been sued or charged with a crime.
“No comment,” they tell reporters who ask about a big case they’re defending.
That’s why I was delighted to read about the successful publicity campaign launched by Boston-based Ropes & Gray in spring last year. With help from the Castle Group, its PR firm, the attorneys began positioning themselves as experts who could comment on Google’s initial public offering.
“Every day we’d be reading all the newspapers and checking Web sites looking for reasons for the lawyers to comment,” says Beth Monaghan, account director at Castle Rock. “With Google, there was so much hype leading up to the IPO that we had a good idea when it was going to happen. The thing that set the Google announcement apart was while all parties related to the announcement were bound by SEC quiet period restrictions and couldn’t talk about it, R&G could.”
What the law firm did in the following months proved such a success that within just a few days after Google announced its IPO, the firm’s attorneys got more than 75 media hits, including the Boston Globe, Investor’s Business Daily, the Miami Herald, Newsday, Newsweek, Reuters, and some cable TV outlets. A second publicity push resulted in 120 hits, including ABC News, Bloomberg Radio and CNN Online.
Read about how they did it in this PRNewsOnline article.
When you’re convinced this can work for you, too, understand the difference between an expert and an expert spokesperson. Al Rothstein, who was my guest during a teleseminar a few years ago called “How to be an Expert Spokesman the Media Love”, said a spokesperson can go on the air and just talk in general terms.
“The way I coach spokespersons is, I say never make predictions on the air because it can always come back to haunt you,” he said. “As we know, the media keeps videotapes and they will come back and say, ‘Well, this person said this and they were wrong.’ Well, an expert is expected to make predictions, like we said before, whether they’re right or wrong, and it’s OK if they’re wrong some of the time.” (Excerpt)