Personal Crisis Communication for Lawyers- Huse Quoted

Jill Huse was recently quoted in a story regarding personal crisis communication for lawyers by Law360's Lisa Ryan.  An exerpt from the article can be found below.  To read the full article, click here.

How To Save Face When You're Caught In A Data Leak

By Lisa Ryan

Law360, New York (August 19, 2015, 8:01 PM ET) -- Many attorneys may be caught with their pants down in the recent hack that exposed email addresses used to access the extramarital dating website Ashley Madison.

Hackers on Tuesday released data stolen from Ashley Madison divulging email addresses, credit card information and more from the site's 37 million users. Some of the leaked email addresses may match those of attorneys working at top firms, though Ashley Madison doesn’t have an email verification feature to confirm the veracity of those addresses.

Here’s how to handle a scandalous leak while preserving your professional reputation:

Fess Up Immediately

The first thing you need to do when you find your dirty laundry aired online is to tell your law firm right away.

“The best practice is to take immediate accountability and to try to get out in front of the story as much as possible,” Jill Huse of legal communications firm Society 54 LLC said.

If your name or firm email address is in any way linked to a scandal, it’s important to notify your firm as soon as possible so that they can get a handle on the situation and manage the backlash on their end, according to Huse, who used to do marketing in-house at a firm.

“It’s much easier to respond to the press when you know what’s going on,”  Huse said. “If their employer doesn't know about it, the immediate course of action is to suspend or terminate the attorney. The firm is trying to manage clients’ perception and public perception of what happened, so being on the front end of that is very important.”

“The faster you admit a mistake, the faster it goes away," Rubel said. "It’s the people who try to hide behind a veil, especially when it is true, that have it come back and come back."

Get Off Social Media

When your name is dragged in the mud, a natural response is to stand up and fight back. But at a time like this, steering clear of social media is key.

“If someone knows the news is breaking, it would probably be good to disable their social media for the time being until everything blows over,” Huse said.

A comment left on Facebook in the heat of the moment or a malicious response on Twitter could haunt you and affect your professional reputation moving forward.

“They should stay off social media and not combat anything, because it can just get out of proportion, unless they’re taking full accountability and apologizing for their actions,” Huse said.

Besides, if your reputation is already in tatters, there’s a big chance that anything you say online could be taken out of context.