Here's a cheat sheet for corporate communications types who have to manage their company's litigation PR. Walter Olson at Point of Law gives you a list this morning of where the trial lawyers are expanding with the help of Congress and the Obama Administration. Start getting ready for more employment discrimination, HIPAA, whistleblower, and med-mal lawsuits, for example. State AGs are going to be more aggressive, too.

Change you can believe in.

You can never say it enough to your client: "Stay on message… Remember to bridge back to the message… Repeat the message... Say it again and again."

Clients hate this. They get bored repeating the same messages over and over. They start to ad lib. The next thing you know you have a new, bigger, more complicated problem on your hands.

So the next time you are advising a client to stay on message and keep repeating the messages you can point to three studies highlighted in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 96(1), Jan 2009, 32-44. Here is the abstract:

Repeated statements are perceived as more valid than novel ones, termed the illusion of truth effect, presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity. In 3 studies, the authors examined the conditions under which and the processes by which familiarity signals from repetition and argument quality signals from processing of message content influenced agreement with persuasive arguments. Participants with low or high motivation to process information were presented persuasive arguments seen once or twice. In all 3 studies, repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments when little processing of message content occurred. Two of the studies used a process dissociation procedure to reveal that both greater controlled processing (which reflected argument content) and the greater automatic influence of familiarity (which reflected repetition) were associated with increased acceptance of strong arguments but that greater controlled processing dissipated the benefits of familiarity for agreement with weak arguments.

Repeat after me: “Repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments…. .”

I believe that this research also validates the recommendation to engage in a broad campaign of so that the audience are hearing the messages from multiple sources. Apparently, the echo chamber works.

Hat tip to JuryVox at Twitter for bringing the blog post at Crime & Federalism to my attention.

How do you explain being taken in the biggest Ponzi scheme in history?

This is the quite real challenge confronting the many investment firms and money managers who invested their clients’ wealth with Bernard Madoff. That wealth is has now evaporated. What lingers are some hard questions: Did they do their due diligence? Were they in on the scheme? Were they just duped?

And, the inevitable lawsuits have begun. Already the sharks are circling. Some of the big-name plaintiff’s firms are already populating the web prowling trolling for clients. “We believe you may have legal claims…please contact us immediately,” urges one firm. “Click here to contact a financial fraud attorney,” says another. Even silk stocking defense firms are setting special units. although the analysis is that the winnings will be small potatoes, $20 million or so, and hardly worth the effort.

Still some people got some ‘splaining to do, as Desi demanded of Lucy. And the answers sound almost as credible as the ditzy redhead’s:

"We have worked with Madoff for nearly 20 years," said a former federal regulator and the head of an investment firm facing losses of $7.5 billion. "We had no indication that we...were the victims of such a highly sophisticated, massive fraudulent scheme."

It's a sentiment a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission: "I've known [Madoff] for nearly 35 years, and I'm absolutely astonished."

"You get hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails; there's no guarantee the SEC is going to catch" any given wrongdoer, said another former commissioner. That said, the commish made clear that there are no excuses.

Frankly these explanations don’t scan. “I didn’t see it coming,” “I got fooled,” and “We get lots of mail,” probably aren’t good legal defenses. And in the court of public opinion they won’t work at all.

Read more »

Updated 2/5/2009 1:18:01 PM

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Litigation communication works? You don't say.

By  Robert H. Bork, Jr.  ·  Monday, February 02, 2009

Minnesota Public Radio story today about the Coleman/Franken Senate recount court battle validates litigation pr:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania says eight years later, the Bush experience in Florida appears to be informing the Coleman and Franken strategies in Minnesota.

"The lesson that consultants and campaigns learned from the 2000 recount was that you can win in public opinion and, in important ways, shape the debate that's taking place," said Jamieson.

Jamieson said Franken and Coleman are both trying to publicly frame recount issues in their favor in the hope they can color the context in which the judges consider the case.

Read the whole story here.

Updated 2/2/2009 8:20:31 AM

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List of the top 300 law blogs

By  Robert H. Bork, Jr.  ·  Sunday, January 25, 2009

Here's a handy list of the top 300 law blogs ranked by traffic. Anybody who needs or wants to follow what's happening in the law will find this very useful. And no, legalprblawg, isn't listed because we just haven't been working at it hard enough. My bad, as my teenage daughter says. Maybe next year.

Updated 1/25/2009 1:25:41 AM

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