Friends,

I am pleased to celebrate the publication of Crisis Counsel: Navigating Legal and Communication Conflict.

Author Tony Jaques is a world-renowned expert on crisis and reputation. He heads Issue Outcomes, headquartered in North Melbourne, Australia. He worked for more than 20 years in Corporate Issue and Crisis Management, mainly in Asia-Pacific, and served two terms as a Director on the Board of the Issue Management Council, in Leesburg, Virginia.

 

The book opens with Dr. Jaques laying out the stakes of getting crisis response right:

“The Economist magazine examined the impact of crises which struck eight major corporations (worth over $15 billion) from 2010 to 2018 and the median share price fell by 33 percent. While most clawed back their absolute losses, compared with a basket of industry peers over the same time period the median firm was worth 30 per cent less in 2018 than it would have been without the crisis, a total deficit of $300 billion across the eight companies.

A survey of 685 business leaders from Fortune 1000 firms found they believed it would take more than four years to recover from a crisis which damaged an organization’s reputation, and three years for a crisis to fade from the memory of most stakeholders.

And an international law firm analyzed major reputational crises around the world and found that in companies unable to recover pre-crisis share value, 15 per cent of senior executives left within a year, compared with a departure rate of just four per cent in companies where share value did recover.”

The caricature of lawyers’ interventions in crisis (honored as much in the breech as in the observance) is that of forbidding the organization from saying anything or doing anything visible. While some lawyers still behave this way, increasingly lawyers are seeing themselves as business advisors as well as legal advisors. And we know that just as any crisis is a business problem before it is a communication problem, every crisis is also a business problem before it is a legal problem. Dr. Jaques points out that just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.

He offers practical guidance to CEOs on how to weigh conflicting advice, to lawyers on how to understand the bigger picture, and to communicators on how to be more persuasive in making the reputation-protecting case.

The book is well-researched and written.

More important, it is easy to read and very engaging, with a wealth of case studies, practical examples, and key takeaways. The case studies are from around the world and from a range of organizations, from companies to governments to the military. And the lessons conveyed are priceless.

I consider Crisis Counsel to be a must-read for those who advise or wish to advise on high-stakes situations, whether you are a lawyer, a communicator, a CEO, or a leader of any other form of enterprise.

Forewords

I am honored to have written one of the three forewords to this important contribution to the field.

The other forewords were written by:

• Dr. Robert Heath, Emeritus Professor of Communication in the Jack Valenti School of Communication of the University of Houston.
• Tony Langham, the Chief Executive of Lansons, based in London and New York and the author of Reputation Management: The Future of Corporate Communications and Public Relations.

 

Excerpts From My Foreword

Here’s what I said in my Foreword.

“I have been a crisis advisor for more than 35 years and have taught crisis management and crisis communication in graduate business and professional schools for more than 30 years. I have advised lawyers and been hired through lawyers to advise our mutual clients. I have taught lawyers through bar associations and have trained individual lawyers in crisis management. And I have fought with lawyers; sometimes I have won those fights. And I have learned from lawyers.

A typical interaction is this: In the CEO’s office the lawyer will give all the legal reasons to say as little as possible in the early phases of a crisis. The CEO will then look at me. My reply,

‘I believe you have received excellent legal advice. And you should take it seriously. But please recognize that you don’t have a legal problem, at least not yet. You have a business problem. And you need to make a business decision. You need to consider the risk of legal liability seriously.

But not exclusively. You should also consider the consequences of the loss of trust of those who matter to you: your employees, customers, investors, regulators, and others. You can protect yourself from legal liability that will play out years from now but lose the company in the process. Or you can attend to the immediate needs and concerns of your stakeholders now, in ways that manage future legal liability.” It’s very hard for the lawyers to object to that.

I then offer, “Between self-defeating silence and self-destructive blabbering, there’s lots of room to maneuver.”

I then ask the lawyer about categories of possible communication:

• Can we acknowledge awareness of what has happened? The answer is usually Yes.
• Can we express empathy toward those who are affected? The lawyers usually say, Yes, but we need to be careful not to admit blame. My reply, Great. Let’s do it carefully.
• Can we declare our values? We typically have them published on our website. Can we describe the overall approach we will take to address the crisis and resolve it? The lawyers usually say we need to be very careful. I again reply, Great. Let’s do it carefully.
• Can we make some kind of commitment? How about a procedural commitment: We’ll update you when we know more. Or a substantive commitment: We’ll get to the bottom of this and fix it. This often leads to the lawyers and communicators collaborating early in the crisis to find the balance. It doesn’t need to be adversarial or either-or.

Tony Jaques has written a masterful guide to managing the natural tension between lawyers and communicators. Crisis Counsel: Navigating Legal and Communication Conflict is a highly readable guide to effective and respectful interaction among lawyers, communicators, and business leaders.

He helps us understand the mindset of lawyers and the mindset of communicators, and how leaders can exercise good decision skills.

He includes a wealth of real-world examples of well and poorly handled crises from around the world and across forms of organization. It contains both wisdom and practical tools for responding effectively in a crisis. And he quotes a wide range of crisis experts (full disclosure: including me). This is an important contribution to our understanding of crises, leadership, and decision-making. It’s the kind of book I wish I had been able to read when I was just starting in crisis decades ago. And it is a valuable book for lawyers, communicators, and leaders in all sectors.”

About the Author

Tony Jaques, PhD, has spent much of his working life describing, researching and writing about crisis management, and helping to manage crises in government and in corporations.

He has served as a government ministerial advisor, corporate executive and business consultant and has an international reputation as an authority on issue and crisis management and risk communication. I

In his role as Asia-Pacific Issue and Crisis Manager for The Dow Chemical Company for more than 20 years he was responsible for implementing local issue, crisis and community outreach programs throughout the region and had a hands-on role in managing a number of high-profile crises. He continues to serve as a thought leader in those areas with new projects to educate other fellow professionals as a conference speaker.

Dr Jaques is a New Zealander who now lives in Australia, where he runs his own consultancy and lectures post-graduate students at two universities. At an earlier stage of his career he was a journalist in New Zealand and London, and later worked as a management strategic advisor and speechwriter.

He has written very extensively about issue and crisis management.in academic and business publications around the world, and is the author of three previous books in the field — Don’t Just Stand There: the Do-it Plan for Effective Issue Management (2000); Issue and crisis Management: Exploring Issues, Crises, Risk and reputation (2014); and Crisis Proofing: How to Save Your Company From Disaster (2016). He is also the author of the definitive, three-volume Dictionary of Battles and Sieges (2006). Dr Jaques is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Issue Management Council in Washington DC and received their Howard Chase Award for achievement in the field. He holds a doctoral degree from RMIT University (Melbourne).