Raising a Case's Profile Isn't Marketing. It's Advocacy.

Most law firms think about publicity the wrong way round. They ask how a case can raise the firm's profile. The better question, and the one that wins the work, is how the firm can raise the profile of the case, and the client whose life is inside it.

The distinction matters because the two goals pull apart under pressure. A case that's good for a firm's marketing is not always good for the client, and the moment those interests diverge is when a firm's judgement is tested.

Start with consent and treat it as a living thing rather than a signature. A client who agrees to “some press” in a quiet meeting cannot picture what it feels like to see their grief leading the evening news, or to read a stranger's comments underneath it.

Consent given once is not consent for everything that follows. It must be specific, revisited and revocable. The client must know they can stop it at any point without feeling they've let you down.

Then ask whose voice is doing the talking. The point of taking a case public is to carry the client further than they could carry themselves, not to speak over them. When the lawyer's name is the headline, and the client is a supporting character in their own story, something has gone wrong.

The families I've worked with don't want a spokesperson who performs their pain. They want their own words heard.

Understand, too, that the narrative is contested. In any case against an institution, whether a hospital trust, a police force, or a government department, the other side has a communications operation that is already working.

Stay silent, and you don't avoid a story; you let someone else write it. Firms find this uncomfortable, because shaping a narrative sounds like spin. It isn't. Spin distorts. Advocacy gives an accurate account a fighting chance of being heard over a better-funded one.

None of this works without a duty of care that outlasts the news cycle. The story runs for a day; the client lives with it for years. That means anticipating the long tail: the search results, the anniversary coverage, the moment a child grows up and reads it all back. Where a case touches suicide, abuse or acute mental distress, the Samaritans' media guidelines aren't a hurdle to work around. They're the floor. Never the method, never the sensational detail, nothing that turns a person's worst day into clickbait.

Remember as well that communications serve the legal strategy, not the other way round. Press at the wrong moment can prejudice proceedings, hand the other side your argument early, or stray into contempt.

Firms that get this right run their comms and their litigation as one conversation, not two departments that meet after the damage is done.

Here's the part most firms miss. The mark of doing this well is how little of it is about you. The best work I've seen leaves the firm almost invisible in the coverage: no quote-hunting, no logo in the photograph, no partner cast as the story's hero.

The client's voice is louder, and the firm's is barely there. That restraint reads as confidence, and confidence is what referrers remember. You'll still get your mention. And you can tell the client, without a shred of duplicity, that you want it to help raise the issue, trusting that doing right by them brings the firm its results in turn. I've always felt morally able to tell a client that we want our name in a story because we're proud of the work we do and we want to do it for others. Because that's the truth.

Raising the profile of a case is a duty, not a marketing opportunity. Treat it as a chance to put yourself in the frame, and you get a short-term mention and a client who feels used. Put the client's voice first, and you build the one thing that compounds: a reputation for handling people's worst moments with care.

So before you take a case public, the question isn't what it will do for the firm. It's whose voice leaves the room louder.