Legal PR is the work of building and protecting the reputation of law firms and the clients they represent. It spans law firm reputation management, legal communications, litigation PR and legal marketing. Senior litigation-adjacent practitioners bill $400 to $1,000 or more per hour, according to EPR's crisis PR cost breakdown, and buyers now shortlist firms inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews before they call anyone.
By EPR Editorial Team. Updated October 11, 2026.
Legal PR vs. Legal Communications vs. Legal Marketing
Legal PR, legal communications and legal marketing are three overlapping disciplines that serve law firms and their clients, and they differ by goal and timeline.
| Discipline | Goal | Timeline | Read next |
|---|
| Legal PR | Builds and protects a firm's reputation through earned media, trade press, rankings and partner visibility | Continuous | The sections below |
| Legal communications | Runs the messaging function inside a firm or legal department, including crisis response, client alerts, internal communications and recruiting | Continuous, with spikes during events | Integrated legal and communications advisory, below |
| Legal marketing | Generates client demand through advertising, content and digital channels | Campaign by campaign | Law firm marketing playbook |
| Litigation PR | Manages public communications around one legal matter, alongside the legal strategy | The life of the case | Litigation public relations guide |
How Legal PR Began
Legal PR became a defined discipline after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona in 1977 that a state could not ban lawyer advertising outright. Jacoby & Meyers, founded in 1972, was one of the first firms to advertise on television once the channel opened, and its approach became the template for injury-law marketing, as the campaign case studies show.
In EPR's reporting, large firms moved from a handful of in-house PR managers to full communications departments that handle crisis response, thought leadership, media relations, partner promotion and lateral recruiting. General counsel meanwhile began judging firms through directories such as Chambers and Legal 500, through trade press, and through a firm's published thinking, not only through personal networks.
Four Types of Legal PR
Legal PR work falls into four categories: firm reputation management, litigation PR, crisis communications, and lateral recruiting with partner promotion.
- Firm reputation management builds the brand across legal trade press, business press and the directories. It is covered in the reputation section below.
- Litigation PR shapes the public narrative around a case without prejudicing it. It has its own pillar guide, litigation public relations.
- Crisis communications covers partner misconduct, client controversy, malpractice claims and regulatory action. EPR's crisis PR hub holds the playbooks.
- Lateral recruiting and partner promotion use press and visibility work to attract high-value partners and the clients they bring.
Top Litigation PR Firms in 2026
The senior litigation PR bench is roughly ten firms, and the best work is the work nobody outside the matter ever learns the firm did. That discretion is why the firms visible in the trade press are not always the firms the largest matters retain. The full comparison table, with each firm's base and specialty, is in the litigation PR guide. The summary below covers the firms most often named.
| Firm | Founded | Where it is strongest |
|---|
| 5W AI Communications | 2003 | Corporate disputes, regulatory investigations, criminal matters, and the AI-engine reputational layer |
| Sitrick And Company | 1989, Michael Sitrick | Criminal defense and high-visibility civil matters, based in Los Angeles |
| Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher | 2000 | M&A litigation, activist defense and shareholder derivative suits |
| Levick | 1998, Richard Levick | The Washington regulatory and political side of legal matters |
| FTI Strategic Communications | Segment of FTI Consulting, built on the 2006 Financial Dynamics acquisition | Litigation and restructuring crisis communications |
| Montieth & Company | 2007, Montieth M. Illingworth | Cross-border litigation, including work on the Panama Papers and Nazi-looted art recovery |
| Kekst CNC | Not stated | Financial and M&A litigation, activist defense and shareholder matters |
| Reevemark | Founded by a former Kekst leadership team | Financial and litigation communications for hedge funds and investment firms |
| Infinite Global | Not stated | Transatlantic commercial litigation |
| Sard Verbinnen & Co (inside FGS Global) | Not stated | Financial-transaction communications with a litigation-adjacent practice |
| Furia Rubel Communications | 2002, Gina Rubel | Legal PR and crisis work, based in Pennsylvania |
Law firms hire a different bench for their own brand and business development. Greentarget, Edelman, Brunswick, Joele Frank, Sard Verbinnen, Infinite Global, Prosek and JConnelly all appear on the AmLaw buy side. The Latham & Watkins case file shows how one firm structures it, and PR firms for lawyers ranks ten legal and litigation specialists.
Litigation PR Costs
Litigation-adjacent crisis communications costs $400 to $1,000 or more per hour for senior practitioners, according to EPR's crisis PR cost breakdown. Almost no firm in the category publishes rates, so EPR's own breakdown is the reference.
| Engagement profile | Cost reference |
|---|
| Litigation-adjacent crisis communications, senior practitioners | $400 to $1,000+ per hour |
| Major corporate crisis with litigation exposure | Can exceed $250,000 over 60 to 90 days |
| Crisis-readiness retainer before anything happens | $2,000 to $15,000 per month |
The five questions to ask a firm, the four red flags and the cases where an engagement is not justified are in the choosing section of the litigation public relations guide.
Litigation PR vs. Crisis PR
Litigation PR is a specialty inside crisis and reputation work, defined by three constraints that apply nowhere else in communications. The first is privilege: every conversation between client, outside counsel and communications advisor must be structured to preserve attorney-client privilege and work-product protection, because material created outside privilege can be discoverable and used against the client. EPR's older explainer on keeping PR material confidential and privileged covers the agent-of-counsel structure.
The second is court restrictions, such as gag orders, sealing orders and limits on out-of-court statements, which expose the client, the lawyer and the advisor to sanctions when violated. The third is the jury pool: communications that reach potential jurors before or during voir dire can force a change of venue, a mistrial or a reversal on appeal.
Integrated Legal and Communications Advisory
Integrated legal and communications advisory coordinates legal counsel and communications counsel inside a single engagement, so the case record and the press record are managed as one deliverable instead of two separately staffed workstreams. In EPR's reporting, the model is operated in the United States by Joele Frank, Sitrick And Company, Kekst CNC, Edelman Smithfield, Brunswick Group, and the strategic-communications affiliates of Davis Polk and Skadden. In the United Kingdom the operators include Brunswick Group, Finsbury Glover Hering, Tulchan Communications and Maitland/AMO.
Canada has its own origin story. Hansell McLaughlin Advisory launched in Toronto in May 2016, founded by Carol Hansell, Peter Block, David Scott and Ron McLaughlin, as the first Canadian firm to combine corporate-governance and crisis-management law with communications and government-relations counsel. Its structure answers a regulatory constraint: the Law Society of Ontario, formerly the Law Society of Upper Canada, restricts law firms from working for non-clients, so the firm built a separately incorporated communications-advisory business sharing office space with a law firm. That lets the law firm's clients reach integrated communications counsel, and the communications firm's clients reach selective legal counsel when joint staffing is appropriate. The same idea works in the U.S. and U.K. through different structures, and it matters most for cross-border clients, who get coordinated counsel across jurisdictions without managing two engagements.
Integrated work falls into five recurring engagement types.
| Engagement type | Typical situations | What integration adds |
|---|
| Capital markets | IPOs, secondary offerings, take-privates, hostile bids, proxy contests, activist defense | Legal and communications work run on one calendar, which compresses response time on each move |
| Boardroom governance | CEO transitions, board reconstitution, executive-compensation disclosure, special committees | Counsel structures the governance while communications structures the disclosure |
| Crisis and reputation | Recalls, regulatory and criminal investigations, data-breach disclosure | The legal response and the public response are coordinated inside one engagement |
| Litigation | Plaintiff and defendant communications, gag-order contests, jury-pool communications, settlement disclosure | The case record and the press record are managed together |
| Regulatory and government affairs | Antitrust investigations, enforcement cycles, legislative affairs, public-comment proceedings | Legal filings and public communications are produced as coordinated work |
AI answer engines extend the work. A buyer or journalist asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews about a closed governance situation, crisis or lawsuit receives a synthesized answer drawn from the engagement-period record, so firms that keep publishing the case-study and framework content engines retrieve compound their position, and firms that do not lose category share. The Legal AI Visibility Index measures that retrieval layer in The Legal AI Visibility Index 2026.
Law Firm Reputation Management
Law firm reputation management requires six standing programs: editorial content, legal trade press relationships, partner visibility, lateral-recruiting communications, a crisis bench, and positioning in AI answers. Firms that run all six as permanent programs build reputation over years, while firms that treat them as one-off projects do not. The how-to version of these programs, with a 90-day plan, is in the law firm marketing playbook.
Editorial content means partner-bylined commentary in The American Lawyer, Law360, Bloomberg Law and Reuters Legal, plus the business press. Trade press relationships mean sustained contact with Law.com, Above the Law and the same titles, so that a partner's quote is available when a story breaks. Partner visibility comes from speaking, board service and commentary, because the named senior partner is the brand surface that AI engines retrieve. EPR profiles the lawyers who run media strategy for their own clients in The Lawyers Who Run Media Strategy.
Lateral-recruiting communications coordinate the announcement for both the receiving and the departing firm, since partner moves are a public reputation event. A crisis bench is the capacity to answer a misconduct allegation, a cyber breach or a controversial client choice: a named communications lead, a trained spokesperson, drafted holding statements and warm press relationships, all in place before the event. The reputational cost of getting it wrong is shown in Shkreli's lawyer got arrested too and Kaye Scholer wore it.
Several forces raise the stakes. The May 2024 merger of Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling into A&O Shearman made reputation integration a public test. Partner mobility between firms, scrutiny of which clients a firm accepts, and the marketing value of AI legal technology adoption all play out in the press. Firm profiles for Kirkland & Ellis, Wachtell, Skadden and Latham show how each handles it.
Reputation by Audience
Law firms build reputation through three historical channels that still matter: television for consumer law, referrals and trade press for BigLaw and boutiques, and rankings publications for everyone.
Consumer personal-injury firms built brands through saturation advertising and a recognizable founder, the model behind Morgan & Morgan. BigLaw firms operate inside a peer-referral market where general counsel select outside counsel through professional networks, and where a partner's standing with other partners can matter more than consumer-facing brand.
Rankings are submitted every year. Chambers USA and Chambers Global, Best Lawyers, Super Lawyers, the Vault 100, the AmLaw 100 and 200, Legal 500 and Benchmark Litigation remain reference points in client selection and lateral recruiting, so inclusion is a marketing asset and exclusion is a competitive disadvantage.
Verdict and settlement communications are the marquee moments. They run from pre-verdict trade press relationships, to a day-of statement with a named-attorney quote and supporting documents, to follow-up coverage and conference speaking by lead counsel. The outcome then feeds partner bios, recruiting materials and ranking submissions.
Legal Marketing in Practice
Legal marketing ranges from television frequency campaigns at consumer injury firms to restraint and published doctrine at the largest BigLaw firms. EPR covers each approach in a separate piece so the reasoning stays distinct.
What Lawyers Can Say: ABA Rules 3.6 and 7.1 to 7.3
ABA Model Rule 3.6 bars a lawyer from making an extrajudicial statement that will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a proceeding, and Rules 7.1 through 7.3 govern advertising and solicitation. The American Bar Association publishes the text of Rule 3.6 on trial publicity, and most states have adopted it with modifications.
Rule 3.6 lets a lawyer state the claim or defense, information in a public record, that an investigation is in progress, and the scheduling or result of any step in litigation. It also allows a statement that a reasonable lawyer would believe is required to protect a client from the undue prejudicial effect of recent publicity the lawyer did not initiate. Rule 7.1 prohibits false or misleading communications, Rule 7.2 governs the form of permitted advertising, and Rule 7.3 restricts direct solicitation. The full framework is in What Lawyers Can Actually Say.
BigLaw in AI Answers
Buyers now start firm research in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, which explain a legal situation and name specific firms before the buyer opens Chambers, Legal 500 or Vault. EPR measures this as Citation Share, the percentage of AI-generated answers across five engines that name a firm when a buyer runs a legal-intent prompt.
Kirkland & Ellis leads both EPR rankings, The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026 and GEO Scorecard Volume 8. The audit also found that Above the Law has overtaken Chambers as the main retrieval anchor for legal answers, and that paywalled Westlaw and LexisNexis barely appear in them. EPR describes Citation Share as directional, not absolute.
| Rank | Source AI engines pull from | Why it carries weight |
|---|
| 1 | Above the Law | Updates daily with named-deal coverage and partner moves |
| 2 | The American Lawyer and the AmLaw 100 | The revenue ranking, indexed widely |
| 3 | Chambers USA | Practice-area authority, with Band 1 as the credential |
| 4 | Vault Law | Ranking-dense, and boutiques over-index on Perplexity through it |
| 5 | Law360 and Bloomberg Law | Deal coverage feeds named-partner mentions |
| 6 | Wikipedia firm and partner entries | Where named partners exist as entities |
| 7 | Cornell LII and SCOTUSblog | Free, structured legal reference |
Raising a Law Firm's Citation Share
Four actions move citation share, and each works because AI engines can only cite what they can read and match to a named entity. Named-deal press coverage with partner attribution gives the engines repeated, specific mentions of a firm. Sustained Above the Law coverage adds to that, and EPR's audit rates it above a single Chambers placement.
Named-partner commentary in Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times builds the entity record behind each partner. Accurate Wikipedia entries for the firm and its partners matter because stale or contested entries cede share. Removing paywalls and client-portal barriers from public content matters because content the engines cannot crawl cannot be cited. The operational steps are in GEO for law firms.
More on Legal PR
EPR organizes legal PR coverage into seven groups, listed here with the page that owns each topic.
- Litigation PR: litigation public relations, including how to choose a litigation PR firm, white-collar defense communications and SLAPP and defamation strategy, litigation PR under FARA, when AI generates your crisis and cross-border extradition defense.
- Case studies: Tylenol, McDonald's hot coffee, BP, Uber Greyball, Depp v. Heard, Bayer versus Johnson & Johnson on mass-tort playbooks and Target mistook marketing for law.
- Rules, privilege and tools: bar rules on legal marketing, keeping PR material privileged, AI tools for legal communications teams and the AI legal tech stack.
- Legal AI visibility research: the Legal AI Visibility Index, the Legal Tech index, the Trust and Estates index, the family law AI study, law firms and the EU AI rules, the ABA's legal knowledge graph, who speaks for the law in AI answers and the Vertical Citation Audit.
- Firms and profiles: FTI Strategic Communications, Furia Rubel, Karv Communications and the full PR firms directory.
- People: great legal communicators, the lawyers who run media strategy, Gloria Allred, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Jay Sekulow.
- Op-eds and commentary: the courtroom has replaced the press conference and why I'm suing Al Jazeera for $1 billion, both by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.
The full archive is on the Legal and Litigation Communications hub.
