PRSA-NYPRSA/New York, after panels that considered whether PR is “ethical” and ditto for healthcare PR, will hear from PR reps of four law firms Nov. 5 on how they promote a profession accused of becoming too poweful.

The 2014 program that considered whether PR is “ethical” found that PR pros can advocate ethical behavior but that lawyers have the “final say.”

PR people, as noted by Michael Schubert of Ruder Finn, are well aware of the tight control lawyers exercise over corporate communication.

“At the end of the day, you don’t have the final say,” he told the panel. “And having been there, arguing for the right thing to day and hearing the lawyer say, you can’t say this and you can’t say that, I think that’s a reality and you should understand that.”

lawyers(L to R) Christopher Rieck, Arielle Lapiano, Joshua Peck, Susan Peters

A “mock trial” Oct. 12, 2015 sought to determine whether healthcare PR is “deceptive, non-transparent and of little value to clients or society.”

Prosecutor Paul Holmes of The Holmes Report said that the problems with healthcare PR are many and that PR pros are essentially wards of the industry rather than legitimate counselors. Schubert, who handled the defense, said healthcare PR has its flaws but its mission is to help in saving lives and not destroying them.

The Nov. 5 program features PR reps who will tell how they do PR for their firms in the face of criticism of the legal system. They are moderator Christopher Rieck of McDermott Will & Emery, 1,100-lawyer firm, and panelists Arielle Lapiano of Paul Hastings, 986-lawyer firm; Susan Peters of Davis Polk & Wardwell, nearly 800 lawyers, and Joshua Peck of Duane Morris, 700 lawyers. It is at 6:30 p.m. at MW&E, 340 Madison ave.

Lawyers Needed on Program

The flaw in the program is that it lacks lawyers. The chapter notes the tight rein kept on PR by lawyers, saying, “Many lawyers believe that the less they say to the media, the better.”

So how outspoken can be four PR people who work for law firms?! This may be a case of lawyers hiding behind PR people. In Westhampton Beach, it is a case of WHB officials hiding behind lawyers. Perhaps a lawyer or two will be added to the panel.

A better program was at the 2013 Society conference in Philadelphia which considered how PR pros can work with managers who “defer to the legal function and court of law rather than PR and the court of public opinion.” A lawyer panelist was Thomas Jennings of Hill Wallack, Morristown.

This reporter was not allowed to cover the panel nor would Jennings or other panelists tell us what was said—a case of legal muzzling communication and free speech.

Legal System Is Under Fire

The legal system is taking a lot of flak lately because of the increasing power of law firms and the courts. The best “PR” for the firms might be showing how powerful they are and ignoring such criticisms. They are “crying all the way to the bank,” as the saying goes.

Critics include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which has a $49 million budget aimed at reducing legal costs of business. It published in 2014 Unprincipled Prosecution, subtitled, “Abuse of Power and Profiteering in the New Litigation Swarm.”

“Unfettered litigation inhibits the creation of new products and companies, kills jobs, and drags down our entire economy,” it says. There are currently 1.22 million lawyers filing 15 million civil lawsuits yearly. The U.S. has 391 lawyers per 100,000 population vs. 23 in Japan and 26 in Canada.

“The U.S is choking on litigation…anyone can sue for anything no matter how absurd or egregious,” wrote Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby May 9, 2014.

Other sites such as Judicial Accountability Initiative Law, the Anti-Lawyer Party, and the site hosted by Dr. Lee Sachs, say the legal system has ceased to deliver fairness and justice to the American public.

The U.S. has the world’s largest prison system—2.2 million people behind bars including about one of 20 black males of working age, notes Sachs.

Lawyers work closely with judges and engage in “an endlessly devious manipulation of words and phrases to get the desired result,” he says. Lawyers “have to make the judge happy first,” he says.

Reporters, according to Sachs, “are little timid people who are afraid of getting fired and who almost never write a story on government corruption unless some other part of the government is officially investigating or prosecuting.”

All of the above sites decry the almost complete disappearance of jury trials. Scranton, Pa., lawyer Marion Munley says justice in the U.S. has deteriorated into a “series of back-room deals.” There are “pre-trials and pre-trials and pre-trials for the pre-trials, benefiting lawyers only,” says the Anti-Lawyer Party.

Lawyers Scream at Us, Limit Remarks

We are sending the PR reps named above a link to the videotape of the Sept. 3 Westhampton Beach trustee meeting at which our remarks were limited to five minutes after WHB’s lawyer Brian Sokoloff got 48 minutes to make his case that the trustees were doing everything they could to block an eruv Jewish boundary from being erected on 47 WHB utility poles.

We could have rebutted virtually all of the points that Sokoloff made and noted some glaring omissions. He quoted court decisions favorable to eruvim but not the 23,424-word Aug. 10, 2001 decision of Federal Judge William Bassler of Tenafly that citizens had no animus towards Orthodox Jews—they just did not want hundreds of telephone poles permanently allocated to a religious purpose. He ordered the eruv dismantled but was overturned by an Appeals Court based in Wilmington.

O'Dwyer vs Sokoloff

Cartoon by Mel Toff
Those who open the link to the Sept. 3 meeting and scroll to one-hour and 11 minutes will see this reporter trying to make points in a brief format—one ninth of the time given to Sokoloff—while WHB lawyer Stephen Angel keeps interrupting my remarks with shouts of, “Address the board!” “Address the board!” and other comments while I was trying to speak.

Imagine a baseball game where one side gets 27 outs to score runs and the other side only gets three outs. Batters on the three-out side are pelted with debris while trying to hit.

The conduct of the Sept. 3 WHB meeting a travesty of justice and fairness but what we have come to expect when laws alone are cited. What is strictly legal may not be what is ethical. The WHB trustees refused to put us on the agenda, which would have given us sufficient time to rebut Sokoloff, and instead invoked a “five-minute” rule for any member of the public addressing the trustees.

Hamptonites have endured a very negative experience of the law and courts since 2011. They have been accused of bigotry and threatened with millions in fines and legal costs because they reject a religious sect’s claim that it has the “civil right” to convert public land to a private domain.