This is one of the ads for our reputation management consulting services that we’ve been running for a few years…

Setting aside the impactful tweeting of our President, if ever there was an example of the truth behind our copy, this tweet from Kylie Jenner is it:

sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.

— Kylie Jenner (@KylieJenner) February 21, 2018

It caused Snapchat 1.2 billion dollars in market cap loss.

A tweet shouldn’t be able to do this much damage (and granted, this one says a lot about our culture and the fragile nature of the “eye-ball” economy), but the fact is, it can. Lot’s of damage – more damage than you can quantify. (Snap Inc. lost $1.2B in value immediately. How many folks who would have signed up, now won’t at all?)

That’s why making sure you have the resources and expertise to respond effectively are paramount to survival in our current environment.

Do you? Give us a call, if not. Building and protecting reputations is what we do.

In recent years, compensation at the nation’s largest law firms has been a fairly transparent matter. Above the Law reports enthusiastically—one could say obsessively—on associate compensation. Meanwhile, the American Lawyer releases one of the most closely watched metrics in the entire profession, “profits per partner,” in connection with its annual Am Law 100 and Am Law 200 rankings. But lately, the compensation picture has been getting murkier.

But, profit is a very good indicator of good strong management and client satisfaction too.

Dentons created a stir this spring when it announced its decision not to share its profit-per-partner numbers with the American Lawyer. On the associate front, increasingly complex and non-public bonus systems are making associate compensation harder to nail down at any given firm. Some firms, like Jones Day, have moved even their base compensation for associates into a “black box,” away from public view.

Whether or not you believe this incipient trend away from transparency is a bad thing probably depends on where you sit. Many have questioned whether Dentons’s reason for withholding its information could be called “legitimate.” (The fact that it distributed a press release earlier in the year announcing a 4.8% increase in its U.S. PPP gives them some reason to do so.) In defending its decision, however, Dentons also raised some points worth considering, including this one:

[Global CEO Elliott] Portnoy and [global chair Joe] Andrew argue that the PEP figures say “nothing about the success of a firm” and may lead to client dissatisfaction. Andrew elaborated on the latter point in an interview with Legal Week. “From a client perspective,” he said, “they see our profitability as services that aren’t invested into further support for them.”

For the record, Dentons claims that its decision has been very well received by clients, which might be how the clients see Dentons. But, profit is a very good indicator of good strong management and client satisfaction too (just ask Wachtell). And in contrast to opacity, transparency, from where we sit, is good for the soul.

There was a great panel at the 25th Annual Legal Marketing Association Conference yesterday in Orlando about the power of PR to help facilitate and add value to the law firm-client relationship. Some of the examples shared about horrific legal situations that resulted in bad press, which could have been easily been mitigated by common sense PR counsel, reminded me of this recent post of ours from February.

If you work in corporate America, at one time or another you’ve probably heard someone say “We should run this by legal.” It’s usually a wise move: when you make a tricky business judgment, you want to be sure it’s not going to come back to haunt you.

A PR review, however, would have alerted the company to the huge dangers lying ahead.

Which is why it surprises us that when companies make decisions that warrant a review by lawyers, they don’t also “run this by public relations.” After all, a misjudgment about the PR impact of a business decision can cause even greater fallout than a legal misstep. Take, for instance, the case of Ceridian Cobra Services.

Ceridian recently got a ton of bad press for itself when it denied coverage to a man about to undergo surgery, all over a very small shortfall in his premiums. Did we mention that the man is a military vet, the surgery was a potentially life-saving procedure, and the shortfall in question was two cents?

This is the kind of story that starts local, but quickly goes national.

And this is exactly the kind of bad press that can be avoided by instituting a corporate protocol to conduct a review of the PR impact of difficult business decisions in addition to their legality. Here, Ceridian may very well have made an acceptable decision, legally speaking.  Indeed, we hardly know all the facts of the two-cent case, and there may have been compelling legal reasons to deny coverage. So “legal” may have signed off on the denial with a big thumbs up.

A PR review, however, would have alerted the company to the huge dangers lying ahead. The PR department would have seen, immediately, that any nuanced reasons for denying coverage in this case would get swept aside by the tidal-wave force of an irresistible narrative: Health Insurer Denies Vet Life-Saving Surgery Over Two Cents.

In addition to saving the company a PR nightmare, the PR review could have resulted in this story being turned around 180 degrees into invaluable feel-good press for Ceridian. A smart PR person would have told the claims executive about to issue the denial to instead pay the two-cent shortage out of her own pocket. Voila, Ceridian has a great counter-trend story to shop about a health insurance company caring for its customers. (And the fact that the claims executive would later get a $500 bonus to cover the two cents wouldn’t need to be mentioned.)

Yes, Ceridian would have to provide the coverage-but cost of the surgery could hardly approach the tremendous reputational cost of its denial.

So, for law firms and businesses: consider instituting a protocol that involves PR in your significant business decisions. Doing so can save a lot of headaches and find hidden opportunities for positive PR.