Fishburn Hedges

29.06.2011

Libel lawyers tend to get a bad press. And that’s no surprise as one of their roles it to sue journalists. Or not if you believe the reputation management team at lawyers Addleshaw Goddard.

This morning I attended a very interesting seminar lead by Korieh Duodo from the firm, where they talked about alternatives to litigating when trying to protect a clients reputation from attack by the media. The seminar was under the Chatham House rule so I can’t go into detail, but the central themes were:

Don’t sue unless all else fails

And

You can win the legal action but lose the reputational battle.

This has been shown very clearly in recent cases – such as the attempts to keep news about Ryan Giggs’ social life out of the media.

Addleshaw suggested a number of ways of dealing with issues without going to the courts. These included negotiation with the papers – and here they recommend working with a PR firm (you can see why we like Addleshaw) – or making a complaint to the media regulator. In the UK these are the Press Complaints Commission for printed media, the BBC for – er – the BBC and Ofcom for the rest of broadcasting.

As it happened Jonathan Collett, communication direction of the PCC, was also at FH towers yesterday to talk about their work. He pointed out that the PCC has a 24 hour helpline, giving advice if you think you have been treated unfairly by the media (or are about to be treated unfairly, as a lot of their work is pre-publication). Where the PCC intervenes they talk to publications at a senior level and the publications take action in the vast majority of cases.

Mr Collett pointed out that certain public figures – Lord Mandelson  was cited – were exceedingly adept at using the PCC, so much so that Mandy could get stories in the first edition of a paper, amended or removed by the second edition. He also said that the PCC issues over 100 desist notices a year (the equivalent of two a week), stopping papers for doing stuff like door-stepping the relatives of victims of murderers.

The PCC has historically been seen as a bit of a paper tiger. But under chairman Baroness Buscombe, who wrote for this website on expectations of privacy recently, it has taken a more practical and more effective role in dealing with a large volume of cases, without the need for the courts to be involved. We certainly have seen them being effective.

Ofcom and the BBC Trust have also shown their teeth, most recently in the Trust’s censure of Panorama’s investigation into Primark. As Addleshaw argued this morning, working with your PR team to publicise these rulings, as Primark did, is a good way of dealing with the damage a negative article can create.

The tricky issue for all of this – and indeed the law courts – is that digital media goes way beyond national boundaries, and it is impossible to regulate the proliferation of information sources globally. That said, within the narrow confines of these shores, the case for not suing has been well made.

Posted by Jason Nisse