Bold Advocacy: Marketing Strategies for Law Firms Handling Controversial Clients

Defending controversial clients can feel like walking a tightrope. For law firms, it’s a high-stakes gamble that can elevate their status as fearless advocates or tarnish their reputation beyond repair. But what if, instead of fearing controversy, firms leaned into it, crafting a narrative that showcases their legal prowess?

Ways to Safely Promote Controversial Work, Externally and Internally

When referring to controversial clients or issues (existing or past), anonymizing the representation by industry is a great way to share information with potential clients without firmly attaching yourself to it. Those details on a website or attorney biography can get the information across without concern over disclosing the representation. Additionally, you might refrain from putting a controversial client or issue on an attorney’s individual biography and instead use it on the practice group’s page to further preserve anonymity.

To help market a representation internally, you can develop more detailed fact sheets that can be used to educate attorneys on the issue. Additionally, you can post a write-up to the firm’s intranet with more details on the matter, but clearly labeled that these details are not meant to be shared externally. This can give your attorneys the right level of detail needed to confidently and confidentially discuss the client and issue at a high-level with potential clients.

Using the Intake Process to Set Your Firm’s Standards

One of the key ways to address working with controversial clients is during the client or matter intake portion. Firms represent clients with a range of external reputations, matters and issues. But when dealing with issues that are highly sensitive or could potentially impact the firms’ reputation, a few key steps at the beginning of the intake process can prevent a lot of issues later on.

First, your firm should have an approval process for controversial clients, industries, issues or types of cases. Some firms have a client intake committee review these issues, while others escalate to a policy committee or the firm’s ruling committee (like a management committee).

Firms set their own rules on what clients, industries and issues they are comfortable representing, so your firm’s approach will differ. One rule of thumb for whether a client or issue needs to be reviewed by another approval entity is answering the following questions:

• If we were representing the client on this issue and our firm was listed as involved on the front page of a newspaper, what do we think would happen?
• How would our broad portfolio of clients react?
• How would our attorneys and employees react?

If answering that series of questions gives you pause, that is a sign to send this potential representation to the appropriate approval group for consideration.

Not every controversial client is worth the risk. Firms must also weigh the long-term impact on their client portfolio. Could taking on this client drive away more lucrative, less risky business? In some cases, saying no might be the most strategic decision.

When To Involve Marketing in Reviewing Controversial Clients

If possible, someone from the firm’s marketing team — ideally the CMO — should be involved in the discussions around a potential representation of a controversial client or issue. To prepare for these discussions, the marketing team should run a news search and a litigation docket search to see if other law firms are representing clients with similar issues. If you are weighing a potential controversial representation but your peer firms also represent clients in these areas, that is useful information to know and consider.

As part of the news search for similar clients and issues, if the topic is covered in the media, you should also find out whether the law firm or attorney tends to be identified by name. Many times, a controversial issue is covered by the press, but the law firm and attorney are not included in the article.

Developing and Monitoring the Scope of Engagement

The entity that approved the matter should also develop clear guidelines as to what the matter should and should not cover, with that flowing down into a tight, detailed engagement letter. Any developments outside of the scope of the engagement letter should flow back up to the approving entity and general counsel before the firm’s attorneys can work on those issues.

Once the client has been onboarded and work has started, monitoring the engagement needs to be in place by another team besides the attorneys working on the case. This is usually done by someone from the General Counsel’s office and the marketing team. Their main function is to track the engagement’s progress while keeping a close eye on scope creep beyond the terms of the engagement letter, ensuring the firm does not provide advice on broader issues. This monitoring group should be empowered to escalate issues to the firm’s management as needed.

Considerations for Complicated Issues in the Age of AI

Firms can effectively market their experience representing challenging clients and topics, but forethought is necessary to avoid the firm getting into a difficult position later.

When considering controversial representations, it is important to determine the likelihood of whether the representation might become public. If it is a discrete counseling matter or internal investigation, it is less likely to come to light. However, if it is a litigation matter, federal, state and local regulatory filings, or comment letter, it is possible that the representation could become public. This may cause the firm to take a different approach.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made it easier to discover information on otherwise complicated issues. Using a search engine to find the answer to “which law firms defended manufacturers in the opioid epidemic” produces a wall of blog posts and news articles to sort through. Asking that same question to generative AI develops a list of law firm names, though this list is not always accurate.

As generative AI becomes better at answering questions and gains access to additional data sources, information that was previously more difficult to find will become easier to uncover and share. This should inform your approach when marketing such representations to potential clients and how vague your firm might want to be in marketing materials or publishing information online.

Reputation Is the Long-Game

In today’s world, reputation is a long-term asset, one that is shaped not just by high-profile cases but by how a firm consistently manages its public image. By proactively shaping their narrative, law firms can transform controversial representations into powerful marketing opportunities that demonstrate their expertise and tenacity.

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