A word about lawyers. I should say some of my best friends are lawyers. I like lawyers. Many lawyers are charming people, they are unfairly attacked and mocked in the media. And in popular culture. I almost became a lawyer.

I got accepted to several law schools. Of course, you should have lawyers on your crisis communications team. You should absolutely listen to what lawyers say if they tell you if you say that we're all going to prison. We're all going to jail. Don't say it. You should listen to them.

On what not to say. Having said all this, in my professional opinion, you should never with you exceptions. never listen to what a lawyer tells you to say, during a crisis. Because too often they're only thinking through A very specific lens of the legal side of things. So if they're telling you to say no comment, we can't comment. And you say that maybe they've avoided litigation.

But you're now convicted in the court of public opinion. If everybody hates you, you've lost every customer. Every regulator, every politician votes against you for every zoning issue, tax issue the rest of your business's life and you've gone out of business. Okay, the lawyer can say, I did my job, I kept you out of jail. The fact that you're now out of business, not my problem. That's the problem with listening to legal advice, listening to a lawyer on what to say to the media is is rational and makes as much sense as hiring a media trainer to defend you.

If you're in a court of law and you're being tried for murder. Would you hire me to defend you if you were up on murder charges. I hope not, you'd probably die because I don't know anything about legal defense for people in capital punishment cases. You've got to learn how to filter various areas of expertise, and then assimilate that expertise in a way that makes sense for the job at hand. During the time of crisis, when you've got so many people in the world looking at you, not just trade press, not just investors, but the public could be looking at you, regulators, politicians, all sorts of bankers, investors can be looking at you. This is not the time to forget their concerns and only be thinking about legal ramifications.

As I mentioned, by all means, listen to what lawyers say, when it comes down to avoiding certain things that they think will guarantee you legal problems. The problem is lawyers have never been trained. There's not a law school in the world I'm aware of that actually teaches people this process of brainstorming on media messages down to the top three. Here's how you create sound bites. Here's how you proactively get the message you want. In the final story, law schools don't teach that.

And when you're in a court of law, you have the luxury of a stenographer, writing down everything and letting the judge or the jury reread entire paragraphs that does not exist when you're dealing with the media doesn't exist in the court of public opinion. And in my experience, lawyers want to rewrite sound bites and make them bland and boring and turn it into legal ease. Because they're thinking about the courtroom. They're not thinking about how does an actual reporter from the most important newspaper in your town. How does an actual General assignment, a political reporter or business reporter, or energy reporter for CNN or the BBC, or Al Jazeera, put together a 92nd story. That's not what they're thinking.

They don't understand that. If you write out a bunch of sound bites, a lawyer will look at it, cross them off and rewrite them in a bland, boring way. Guaranteed, not to be quoted, not to get the soundbite you want in the final story. So my advice, of course, get advice from anyone on your legal team on what to say get feedback on what they think is important. Certainly listen very carefully. If they say these messages, if we say them will destroy this company will go to prison.

I've listened to that. But then you've got to look at what's really important. The messages you're trying to communicate, using all the other criteria I've laid out for you. In the beginning of this course in the messaging process, and then what I would do is come up with your top three messages. And if you've got a lot of lawyers involved, don't stop when it comes to brainstorming on three or four or five or six soundbites for each one, come up with 10 1520. That way when lawyers want to go through and scratch off, ones they don't like, you'll still be left with a handful of ones that have not been eliminated.

So you know, you can use those because they've been approved by your legal department, your in house or outside counsel. Do that and you'll have a great relationship with the media, the public, and your legal team. But too often I've seen situations where the PR person is ignored. The outside PR councils ignore the crisis communications counselors ignore and the CEO listens to the general counsel because the general counsel is the second highest paid person In the organization, the general counsel goes to the same country club as the CEO. And they have a very tight relationship. They see each other almost as peers.

And then the general counsel wants to give a statement of we will not be commenting on this at any point today. And that's the only quote, never tell the reporter what you can't say, as we discussed in the whole section of this course, on how to answer questions. You never say what you can't comment on. You never say no comment, always talk about what you can comment on and put a positive spotlight on what you know to be true. And what you're doing to try to make the situation better do that. Everybody will win the lawyers and the non lawyers, the investors, employees and everyone else involved.