A lesson in communciating your beliefes amid crisis from Perkins Coie.
Ken Kerrigan is a senior vice president at The Bliss Group and co-lead of the firm’s Professional Services practice. He has no professional connection to Perkins Coie.
“It is patently unlawful, and we intend to challenge it.”
With those words, issued in a brief statement to the media, the law firm Perkins Coie decided to literally “bet the firm” while defending its values and ability to operate. Ranked among the top 50 law firms in America, Perkins Coie was the target of the Trump administration’s Executive Order 14230, which suspended security clearances for all the firm’s employees, restricted access to federal buildings and threatened to cancel government contracts of organizations that employed the firm.
Perkins Coie wasn’t the first firm targeted by the administration — that distinction belongs to the slightly larger Covington & Burling — but it was the first to fight back. Other firms targeted by Executive Orders immediately acquiesced to the administration’s demands, causing both clients and firm partners to publicly question if those firms had abandoned their values.
To date, over a dozen partners have publicly resigned from these firms, and according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, at least 11 big companies – believed to include the likes of Microsoft, McDonald’s and Oracle, to name a few – are either moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving business to firms that stuck to their values.
While the fight is far from over, the values-driven response from firms like Perkins Coie may provide a blueprint for others to follow when caught in a controversial spotlight.
5 steps for a values-driven response framework
Step 1: Focus on your north star. Values-based messaging creates a consistent framework as you seek to engage multiple stakeholders, each of whom may have different agendas and expectations of your organization. Focusing on values builds trust and enhances the authenticity of your messaging. Perkins Coie focused their messaging not just on the values of the firm, but the entire legal profession. As a result, they were able to issue a call to action that resulted in more than 500 firms coming to their defense.
Step 2: Frame the message for the audience. Focus your message on what’s happening, why it matters, and to whom. Nobody likes a pity party, so it’s important that your messaging addresses the concerns of external stakeholders. In the case of the fight between law firms and the administration, public and, more importantly, client opinion is unlikely to be swayed by saying that a wealthy firm is going to lose money. Perkins Coie didn’t take that path. Instead, they focused the message on the legal precedent of the executive order and its impact on the profession rather than political posturing or self-serving firm preservation, noting, as Managing Partner Bill Malley stated “At the heart of the order is an unlawful attack on the freedom of all Americans to select counsel of their choice without fear of retribution or punishment from the government .”
Step 3: Embrace transparency. Clear, factual statements without inflammatory rhetoric can build credibility through measured, professional responses. What’s more, open communication can engage stakeholders and drive awareness of the issues that need to be addressed. But those messages need to be conveyed with authenticity so that they are embraced by both internal and external stakeholders. And the path to authenticity — communications that ring true — is paved with organizational values.
Step 4: Set the tone from the top. One of the fastest ways to lose trust may be to issue a series of defensive, canned statements attributed to a company spokesperson. Perkins Coie could easily have hidden behind the veil of carefully crafted media statements (likely approved by other lawyers), but it went an important step further by making Managing Partner Bill Malley the external voice of the firm. As a result, they likely enhanced stakeholder trust both outside and inside the firm by literally putting a face on the message.
Step 5: Move quickly. “Tell them what you know; tell them now” is age-old wisdom in crisis communications and may sound cliché today. But unfortunately, it’s also the first mistake organizations make, especially when they are not centering their communications response around their values. If an issue goes against an organization’s values and sense of purpose, framing a response shouldn’t take very long. If it does, questions and disappointment will undoubtedly arise from stakeholders, and a delayed response may not calm those waters. While staring down a serious threat to an organization’s well-being can be scary, a delayed response can create uncertainty and sometimes even anger — anger that some firms are learning can be hard to overcome.
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