This is the second blog in our series, The 7 Rules of Celebrity Crisis Triage, where you’ll learn how to navigate high-stakes moments, protect reputations, and rebuild trust—one step at a time.

Public opinion moves fast. Much faster than the legal system. This can create a bevy of problems when you are trying to manage your celebrity reputation in both a courtroom and on TikTok. Crisis communication specialists know instinctively how important it is to be nimble, adjusting messaging quickly to protect a client’s public image. Lawyers, however, are playing the long game, as matters of litigation can stretch on for months and years—all while your reputation struggles to tread water day-to-day. 

The result? Collaboration between legal and communications teams is more important than ever. In fact, many top law firms now recognize the value of PR crisis management and offer it alongside traditional legal services.

Here, our founder and resident crisis expert, Emily Reynolds, shares her top PR crisis management tips for bridging that gap—keeping your public narrative steady while the legal process unfolds.

Understanding Your Legal Ally

Managing a partnership between legal and communications teams requires understanding what each team is trying to accomplish. This can be difficult in an incident requiring PR crisis management, as each team is likely operating on a different timeline. 

Lawyers and communicators can be strange bedfellows. During a celebrity crisis, both are focused first and foremost on defense. However, more often than not, each team is attempting to cater to a specific audience. For legal teams, restraint is key. For every word that you post on X, lawyers see a new vulnerability that can be exploited in court. 

This posture can be frustrating for communications teams that want to offer more information publicly in order to bolster trust, but it is an important and often necessary counterbalance to any celebrity crisis communication strategy. 

During a live crisis, it can be difficult to navigate this friction. However, Emily recommends taking these basic steps to facilitate a healthy partnership and mitigate roadblocks to your PR crisis management process.

1. Establish an approvals process early. Your legal partners will likely want to see any messaging that is developed in response to a given crisis. It is crucial that you take the time at the outset to designate a process for approvals, so that the team can quickly align on any new language as it becomes necessary, allowing you to communicate nimbly and effectively with the public. 
   
2. Proactively develop baseline messaging: using your newly minted approvals process, build a reservoir of approved language that addresses the issue directly, while appeasing the sensibilities of your legal partners. This can be as simple as a unified holding statement or as intricate as a full scenario map with accompanying FAQs—whatever is feasible for you and your team.
   
3. Lastly, assume positive intent. This is fundamental to collaboration in any context, but it is much harder to keep in view at the outset of a celebrity crisis. Emotions run high, and it can often be easier to interpret different priorities as opposing priorities. Reframing how you view each member of a PR crisis management team—not as opponents with incompatible strategies, but as subject matter experts managing different audiences—can fundamentally improve your efficacy in crisis management. 

Getting Started with PR Crisis Management

Emily notes, “These PR crisis management tips are practical, but require practice. Collaboration is often more art than science, and real-world experience partnering with legal teams is worth its weight in gold during a live crisis.” And as experts forecast a rise in legal disputes next year, celebrities and others in the public eye must be intentional with their preparations.

At RPR, our PR crisis management experts have extensive experience in managing cross-functional teams during a reputation-damaging incident. When attempting to salvage or rebuild trust in the face of a crisis, success is dependent on consistency; consistency, in turn, is dependent on internal alignment; and internal alignment is dependent on understanding your team’s goals and working together to achieve them.

For additional information on navigating the partnership between legal and communications teams, as well as how RPR can step into the gap and provide support, contact us today!

And stay tuned for the next blog in The 7 Rules of Celebrity Crisis Triage [insert link to landing page/leadmagnet when done] series, Rule #3: The “Say Less” Principle [link].