Background
Plaintiffs and prosecutors have long used mass media to get their side of the story out to the public, but the formal practice of litigation PR, a sub-specialty of crisis communication, first emerged in the early 1980s with Alan Hilburg, a pioneer in litigation communications representation of U.S. Tobacco in the Marsee case. Since then, the need for litigation PR has grown tremendously as media coverage of court cases and the law has increased. Most parties to a lawsuit have important interests that expand beyond legal concerns. Negative publicity about a litigant can cause damage to an individuals reputation that a courtroom win years later may not salvage. Thus, parties to cases, whether civil or criminal, can not ignore the impact of negative publicity on public opinion (Reber, Gower, & Robinson, 2006).
Read more about this topic: Litigation Public Relations
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