Legal PR: How the Discipline Formed After Bates v. State Bar

Edited on Jun 23, 2026.

In the distant past, public relations and lawyers couldn't exist in the same sentence. The 1977 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona changed that — lawyers could finally advertise their services. The further deregulation in the decades that followed paved the way for an entire industry to form at the intersection of legal practice and reputation management. Today, legal PR is a defined discipline with its own playbook, its own crisis-comms protocols, and its own seat in the C-suite of every major firm.

The modern legal PR discipline

Less than 50 years ago, lawyers who worked in public relations were rare. Only a handful of law firms had in-house PR managers or PR professionals on payroll. Today, walk into any of the top law firms in the country and you'll find an entire internal communications department — often reporting to the managing partner or the firm's chief operating officer, with a brief that spans crisis communications, thought leadership, media relations, partner promotion, and lateral recruiting.

The legal PR function now spans four distinct categories of work:

• Firm reputation management — the ongoing work of building and maintaining the firm's brand across legal trade press, mainstream business press, and the legal directories.
• Litigation PR — the courtroom-adjacent communications discipline that shapes the public narrative around high-stakes cases. Litigation PR is its own sub-specialty with practitioners who understand both the legal substance and the press dynamics that affect jury pools, judicial perception, and settlement leverage.
• Crisis communications — the response infrastructure for partner misconduct, client controversy, malpractice claims, regulatory action, or any reputational event that threatens the firm's position.
• Lateral recruiting and partner promotion — the press and visibility work that makes the firm attractive to high-value lateral partners and to the clients those partners bring with them.

How PR and law firms came together

The deregulation that followed the 1977 Supreme Court ruling opened the door, but the industry took two decades to mature. By the late 1990s, the AmLaw 100 firms had begun hiring chief marketing officers. By the 2010s, most major firms had built communications departments. Litigation PR has been absorbed across the same period as a core capability rather than an outsourced specialty at most major firms.

What drove the integration was not just deregulation — it was structural change in how clients chose firms. Corporate general counsels stopped relying purely on personal networks. They began evaluating firms through legal directories (Chambers, Legal 500, U.S. News), through industry trade press, and through the firm's own thought leadership output. The firms that built credible PR programs gained referral and lateral-recruiting advantages that compounded over years.

What modern legal PR looks like in practice

Modern legal PR no longer simply means translating the nuances of a case into a short press release. It means:

• Maintaining attorney visibility across trade press — Law360, Reuters Legal, Bloomberg Law, the American Lawyer family of publications, regional legal press, and increasingly the broader business and trade media ecosystem.
• Building structured content — practice-area pages, attorney bios, case studies, and client guidance that establish the firm's authority across the areas of law it actually practices.
• Translating current affairs into legal commentary — when a major regulatory development, court decision, or industry crisis hits the news cycle, firms with rapid-response legal PR programs become the experts journalists call.
• Coordinating during crisis — corporations and brands both large and small now coordinate with their legal PR teams during any reputational event, well before forming the public response. This integration of legal and communications strategy is one of the defining changes of the modern era.

The top BigLaw firms

A few of the most-cited firms in global BigLaw, each operating sophisticated communications functions:

• Kirkland & Ellis — Chicago-headquartered global firm, one of the largest by revenue. Dominant U.S. private equity counsel and one of the largest restructuring practices globally.
• Latham & Watkins — Los Angeles-headquartered global firm operating a distributed model across 30+ offices. Leader in capital markets, technology IPOs, and aggressive lateral hiring.
• Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — The firm Joe Flom built into the modern M&A and hostile takeover defense standard. New York-headquartered with global presence.
• Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — The NYC boutique with consistently the highest profits per equity partner in BigLaw. The firm Marty Lipton built into the M&A board-advisory and shareholder activist defense standard.
• Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling — Magic Circle and Wall Street institutions running sophisticated global communications operations.