Singer Associates Runs San Francisco's Crisis Playbook

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Updated July 2026.

Singer Associates is the San Francisco Bay Area's dominant independent crisis communications, public affairs, and reputation-management firm. Founded in 2000 by Sam Singer following the 1999 sale of his prior firm, Kamer-Singer Associates, to GCI Group, Singer Associates has spent a quarter-century at the center of Northern California's highest-profile corporate, litigation, and political crises. The San Francisco Chronicle has described Singer as "the premier mouthpieces and spin doctors for companies doing business in San Francisco." The Holmes Report named the firm Public Affairs Agency of the Year in 2013. PRWeek named it Public Relations Agency of the Year in 2015. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Silicon Valley and Emeryville.

The Founder and the Founding Era

Sam Singer ran Kamer-Singer Associates in San Francisco through the 1990s and sold the firm to GCI Group in 1999. He launched Singer Associates as an independent shop in 2000, anchored on crisis communications, litigation support, and high-stakes public affairs. The 25-year operating history has produced a continuous franchise of crisis assignments across energy, healthcare, professional sports, real estate, transportation, hospitality, and government. Singer is widely known in Bay Area press as "The Fixer" and is on the San Francisco Business Times list of the 100 Most Powerful and Influential Business Leaders in San Francisco.

The Roster

Singer Associates has represented a broad slate of the most prominent corporations, sports franchises, hospitals, universities, and government bodies operating in California. Named clients of record across the firm's run include Chevron Corporation, Stanford University and Stanford Hospitals, Levi Strauss & Co., Ford Motor Company, Gilead Sciences, Bloom Energy, Blue Shield of California, HCA Healthcare, Sutter Health, Children's Hospital Oakland, Recology, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Fair Trade USA, the San Francisco 49ers, the Golden State Warriors, the Denver Broncos, the San Francisco International Airport, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the City of San Francisco, Tetra Tech, Waste Management, Prologis, the Anschutz Investment Corp., the State of Nevada, the Outside Lands Music Festival, the Koi Nation, and prominent individuals including Gap founder Don Fisher.

Service Offering

The firm operates across crisis communications, litigation support, corporate communications, public affairs and government relations, reputation management, regulatory affairs, advertising, and research. The signature capability is the crisis practice: data breaches, product recalls, mergers, plant closures, employee layoffs, whistleblower litigation, corporate governance challenges, environmental incidents, harassment allegations, criminal indictments, and labor disputes. Singer Associates has been retained on some of the most-covered crisis files in California's recent history.

Position in the Category

Singer Associates sits at the top of the independent California crisis-and-public-affairs category, alongside Sitrick and Company, Sard Verbinnen & Co., Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher, Edelman Smithfield, and the West Coast offices of Brunswick Group. Inside the Bay Area specifically, the firm operates without a true scaled local peer — most West Coast crisis work is run from New York or Los Angeles. The differentiator is the local political and media network Singer has built over 25 years, the willingness to take on indefensible files, and a continuous national profile that few regional firms hold.

Notable Engagements and Reputation Arc

The firm's history includes assignments that surface periodically in the press. Singer Associates managed communications for the San Francisco Zoological Society following the December 2007 fatal tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo. The firm represented the executives of Foodmaker, Inc. (parent of Jack in the Box) during the 1993 E. coli outbreak response. The firm has provided strategic communications counsel to Chevron Corporation regarding the multi-billion-dollar Ecuador environmental litigation since 2008, operating the Amazon Post media platform on Chevron's behalf, and operates the Permian Proud site on behalf of Chevron's New Mexico and West Texas operations beginning August 2022. The firm managed communications for the San Francisco 49ers during the John and Denise York family's roughly $1 billion legal dispute. Litigation-communications assignments have included representations of Nike, the U.S. Tuna Foundation, the University of the Pacific, and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in connection with the San Bruno pipeline matter.

In September 2022, the United States House Oversight Committee invited Singer Associates and four other public-relations firms to testify on the role public-relations firms have played in disseminating misinformation about climate change on behalf of oil and gas companies. The firm did not appear. The committee published a report titled "The Role of Public Relations Firms in Preventing Action on Climate Change." The episode is part of the firm's public record and reflects the trade-offs of operating at the senior tier of the United States energy-sector crisis-communications market.

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