6. Lively v. Baldoni: Lawsuits, Leaks, and Receipts with Defamation Expert Joe Meadows

Reputation Nation hosts Anne Marie Malecha and Stacy Bratcher return for part 2 of the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni series with defamation expert Joe Meadows to explore how lawsuits, leaks, and “receipts” collide in court and the media. From the timing of administrative complaints to the strategic use of litigation websites and selective disclosures, this episode examines how courtroom tactics and crisis PR intertwine when public perception often decides the outcome long before a verdict does. This episode provides practical insights into managing reputational risk, aligning legal and communications strategies, and navigating crises where every move matters.

Lively v. Baldoni: Lawsuits, Leaks, and Receipts with Defamation Expert Joe Meadows Transcript:

Anne Marie:

Welcome to Reputation Nation, the podcast that goes beyond the headlines to unpack corporate crises, legal battles, and the strategies that shape reputations. I’m Anne Marie Malecha the CEO of Dezenhall Resources and crisis management expert.

Stacy:

And I’m Stacy Bratcher, a lawyer who’s battled crises on the front page and in the courtroom. And sometimes those crises have led me into the foxhole with Anne Marie. Whether you’re in the C-suite, the legal department, or are just curious about controversy, we’ve got you covered. Let’s get started.

Anne Marie:

Today we’re going to examine the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni legal and public relations battle. This case is more than a celebrity feud. It’s a case in how to use lawsuits as PR weapons, how public opinion influences outcomes, and how perception is everything.

Stacy:

Joe Meadows is our guest today. He’s a litigation partner at Gordon Reese, a former DOJ trial attorney. His practice focuses on business and contract disputes, defamation, intellectual property issues, cyber attacks, and privacy matters. Joe is the author of The Law of Defamation in Virginia, a frequent lecturer, writer and commentator on defamation and host of the Defamation Download Podcast. Hi, Joe, how are you?

Joe:

Good, Hi Stacy, Hi Anne Marie.

Anne Marie:

Thanks for joining us.

Why would the Lively Camp file the administrative complaint rather go straight to filing a civil suit?

Joe:

Well, it depends on the claim. And in this case, she had an employment based claim where the California courts had the jurisdiction. she had to essentially find out, file an administrative claim with the California agency, have them look at it, potentially investigate it, potentially even prosecute the claim on her behalf or the agency could have decided to dismiss the claim or in this case, I believe they gave her a right to sue letter and she then had the right to file her claim in court. If she filed her claim in court without going through the administrative process, then that would have been a defense that the other side could have raised and had the case dismissed on a jurisdictional defense.

Stacy:

Joe, I think that’s an important fact that I think gets overlooked in all of the fanfare and sensationalism about this case because an independent agency did look into her claims and gave her a right to sue letter.

We don’t know the extent of that investigation if they interviewed people, if they just took the facts on the complaint as true. The other thing I think is important is that that’s signed under penalty of perjury. So, you know, again, there’s so much fanfare with the receipts and collateral evidence, but the, quote, legal filings that have been made in front of, you know, administrative agencies and courts are holding up.

Anne Marie:

Most people don’t understand the administrative process at all. And I do think that that was a leg up for her and having somebody else give some credence to the next steps that she undertook, particularly given in mind that they were going to be heavy in the court of public opinion with the New York Times and what came next. Everything for me in these types of cases, especially when I’m working on them, is what does a win look like? What’s the ultimate outcome that you want to see when engaging in high stakes lawfare? And I do think the administrative complaint was probably helpful to her and her team in that calculus. But, you know, her team lively, I assume they had a lot of conversations before they launched the administrative complaint and then steps thereafter. What calculus do you think they looked at before going down this road of the one to punch of the administrative complaint and then the New York Times piece?

Joe:

Well, I mean, anytime you’re a plaintiff in a lawsuit or you’re bringing a claim, that is a voluntary act.You don’t have to inject yourself into the court system and bring a claim and seek relief. You could do nothing. And I think the calculus was we have to do something. What is that going to be? And between Blake Lively, her legal team, her PR team, other people working with her, they did an analysis of the issues and decided we’re not going to go straight to PR and get our message out through the New York Times or some other media going do that. Plus, we’re going to do something on the legal front. And she believes that she was harmed in the employment context, that she has a right to a remedy in California. And that law says that you have to file an administrative claim first. And that’s what they did. Now, simply because she got a right to sue letter based on her filing under oath in California, I don’t know how much you can read into that and the merits of her claim.

First of all, it’s a requirement that she had to go to that process to sue. And I don’t know who at the agency looked at it and whether they looked at it from a deep dive or not. And maybe they said, well, you’ve checked all the boxes. You’re going to get the right to sue letter. Certainly you can make the other argument that if she had submitted something to the agency and it was defective in some way, it was missing something. They would have bounced that. So you can read into it that it wasn’t on its face, something that was defective.

But in terms of the strength of the case, I think that’s going to bear out in the court proceeding.

Anne Marie:

I think that’s a very interesting thing to consider that was it rubber stamped or was it really investigated? I don’t know that we’ll know that until the case goes to trial, if it goes to trial. Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot is Stacy and I talk about the PR legal continuum all the time. And essentially when you’re in these high stakes lawfare situations, it’s a negotiation between what to keep back, what to put forward, when to do all those things. Do you think that her team expected the blowback that they got after the New York Times and that they were prepared for that?

Joe:

I’m sure they did. I mean, these are very smart, sophisticated people. When you make a big move, whether it’s in the media or in the courtroom, you are looking at five steps ahead, what’s going to happen next? Like a chess game. And I’m sure that they thought of, how is Justin going to respond to this? And that was a factor in deciding to move forward, that they’ll deal with it.

I certainly agree with the first thing you said. There is always kind of a push and pull between the legal team and the PR team. And I would say, and you could probably comment on this as well, nine times out of 10, the lawyers are saying, do less, don’t do this, taking a conservative approach. And the PR, the media team, the crisis management folks, they’re on the flip side, which is fine because having the one extreme versus the other extreme, in the end, you’re going to get a good work product for the client.

Anne Marie:

I agree. I think it’s really important. Often as the crisis management firm that’s not a traditional PR person, I’m sort of in the middle. But the thing that I found interesting here and that I struggled to understand with the Lively Camp’s response to Baldoni’s counterpunch is they had all of the information that was going to go into the complaint from the PR person that left the Baldoni team and defected essentially to the lively team. You knew that those two text messages had the five text messages on the other side of them. Why choose to put out such a narrow scope knowing that the counterpunch was pretty significant if anybody took the time to read through the claim.

Stacy:

Yeah, Joe, you know, this is an area you and I probably overlap in a lot with how do you vet those, what the kids are calling receipts, but we call evidence. It is somewhat shocking as Anne Marie said that they kind of, you know, selected only certain of those texts. So what are your thoughts about that?

Joe:

Maybe the Blake Lively team didn’t have enough time to gather everything that they needed to do when they fired their first shot. And the case is going to take a long time as it goes along and there will be time to amend complaints and bring in new evidence. And it could be they made that calculus and they said, well, we know what he’s going to come back with with all this, these other messages, and we’ve got a response for that and we’ll deal with that at the right time. And maybe the right time is not right now.

Stacy:

Can I ask Joe, in your experience, you know, I would, especially with celebrities at this level, I would think it would be somewhat challenging to say like, Hey, give me your phone. Have you in your career had to, you know, extract text messages from clients or gather that type of evidence. I don’t know that her lawyers were equipped to get what they needed to, you know, sort of see the whole waterfront.

Joe:

Yeah, I’ve been involved in this many times and for the client, it’s super intrusive. But in any event, we have to take the phone. We have to take that phone, give it to a forensic investigator or a digital evidence vendor and have that vendor go through the entire phone and save the material on it. But from the client’s perspective, one, you’ve lost your phone for however long. Two, you know other people are looking at all your things on your phone. Three, you have to spend time working with the lawyers and the vendor to tell them which parts of the phone you use, what it might have on there, and how any of that is relevant to the matter at hand. It’s a little less intrusive now because a lot of this can be done online. Apps can be downloaded onto the phone, and then that app itself will do the preservation and downloading of the data that the vendor can use. still an intrusive process, but I guess slightly less.

Stacy:

But I can imagine, you know, as a lawyer representing a very high profile celebrity who has a celebrity husband and celebrity friends, etc, that there could be a they could try to negotiate a different way to access that information. I can’t imagine, you know, just just the Taylor texts just to, you know, kind of grab the lightning rod there. I mean, that Blake Lively phone is quite valuable. I also can’t even imagine her wanting to turn that over. So I wonder if there was some alternate way that the that the information was gathered.

Anne Marie:

Well, that brings me back to a point Joe made a few minutes ago about how you don’t always get all the information you need from your client upfront. As lawyers, you should be the box of the vault where everything should go. And as a crisis manager, I usually rely on the lawyers to say, all right, these are the things we really need to be thinking about and looking around corners on. But if your client doesn’t tell you, I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve worked on where you’re six months into a case and something new pops up. And sometimes it’s because it was concealed.

Sometimes it’s because it wasn’t known to the client and it’s another situation that arises. But that inability to know what you’re dealing with in the entire landscape, I think is the biggest challenge of any of these cases. And I can’t fault the lively lawyers for that in any way.

Joe:

I mean, trust but verify, right? And have I had clients that have told me things that I’ve been unable to verify? Absolutely. But you deal with it.

Stacy:

I just want to call that out because I do think that depending on the type of client you have, it may be challenging to really get the straight scoop. So I think it’s important for people to know this phone is going to go somewhere and all of your pictures, your texts, your DMs will be available to many people, including court reporters and the media. So you have to be really have a good gut to get through that, think.

Joe:

It’s an intrusive thing for both sides. My guess is from knowledge and experience that in celebrity cases, many times their interactions with legal team and maybe even PR crisis management team is not always direct. There are people in between. There are handlers, there are assistants, there are other counselors. Sometimes there are even lawyers who are not the litigators who are in between the celebrity and the litigation team. And in that way, it’s easier for the celebrity client to do and go about their life, notwithstanding the litigation, which is always a distraction. And it’s easier for the lawyers. They don’t have to be worried about asking certain questions and getting information from the celebrity client. They can do that through an intermediary.

Stacy:

You know, she’s not available. She’s shooting something. You know, they have a different life and different schedules than us. So when you were talking about the having to meet with forensics folks and lawyers, like they’re, they may not be meeting with Blake. So I think hamstrings that legal team.

Joe:

Yes.

Anne Marie:

The intermediaries have a duty to both protect their principle and also sort of be the buffer between. And that often changes their behavior. You don’t necessarily know if you’re getting the full story or you’re being spun a little bit. And I think most of us that have done this kind of work have a spidey sense at some point of you know, what you’re getting, but those layers can be difficult. And I’ve seen that really negatively impact celebrities that have taken on litigation claims because the people around them are yes people. And the lawyers get the information and evidence and say, I don’t know what you think you’re going to do here, but this is not going to bode well for you.

Joe:

100 percent agree. These, the filter between the client and the lawyer is not always a helpful filter in the end. I think, I think the most successful lawyers can be the ones that can break through that filter and work directly with the end client.

Stacy:

The other thing I want to note about this is, and especially when you’re in the pit with some of these rough and tumble plaintiff’s lawyers in other cases, is that while we all strive to have the highest ethics, once that evidence is out, you know, in discovery, you might not have an ethical colleague on the other side.

Once those Taylor Swift texts are in, you know, Brian Friedman’s hands, TBD, what’s done with them, which is, think, one of the reasons the lively camp is really pushed to, you know, have Friedman have to adhere to the rules of professional responsibility and try to get a protective order in those sorts of things.

So my goal is to help folks realize that we can puff our chest up and think we’ve got the best case. But when you’re in the trenches, it’s very invasive and you don’t know where your data could end up.

Anne Marie:

I want us to talk about defamation and why filing defamation happened here, why it’s important. think on the corporate side of things, we’re seeing more defamation cases filed than ever before. And I think people are taking some control of some of the things that are being put out that are wrong and damaging to their businesses. And you know, this is about sexual harassment at the start, but ultimately Baldoni’s team came back and filed a defamation claim against the New York Times. What’s the calculus of using defamation as a vehicle?

Joe:

For these celebrity cases and, and all the ones of the like, money is not probably the primary goal. What is a primary goal is to publicly refute what is being said about you in the public. And one of the best ways to do that is through an actual lawsuit. I mean, one, you can do it through the media, but doing it in lawsuit kind of has a formality to it and a strength behind it that you might not get when you’re putting out your own press release.

I guess the other reason sometimes people bring defamation lawsuits is deterrence. You know, they want to show that if somebody is going to say falsehoods about them that injure their reputation, they’re not going to back down. They’re going to come after you.

Finally, I guess the attention, know, sometimes people are bringing defamation suits, you know, not only because they think they’ve been harmed, but maybe it’s going to help bring attention to their issues. And maybe even there’s some self-serving interest in getting some attention to themselves that they’re otherwise not getting. I’m not saying that happened here, but that has happened.

Anne Marie:

The attention seeking piece, obviously the media side of things is where I dwell and I think that this case, in my opinion, was made for a TV movie, if you will. And I think they’ve used that to, I think both sides have tried to use that to their advantage. What’s your feeling about the leaking of information outside of court filings and backgrounding of reporters and the process outside of what happens in the courtroom to be potentially advantageous to your ultimate legal goals?

Joe:

Well, I guess before I answer that, do you think it’s at all possible that this whole thing was engineered by both sides together?

Anne Marie:

I’m actually not against that theory at all because it has kept them all in the news in a way that in some ways is valuable. Now, my only counter to that is what I know about the Ryan Reynolds camp and their production camp. I think this is not looking good for them at the moment. So I’m very curious what end game they get to that would make it a net win for both sides. Because right now it really seems like there’s going to be a winner and a loser, but maybe I’m missing something.

Joe:

Well it seems wild. It also seems that there are some people that got caught in the crossfire of this engineered plan.

Anyway, you asked about information and getting things leaked out from a court case. Things get leaked out. Is that because one side or the other side is breaking the order or breaking the agreement and disclosing things to the public? Possibly. Could it be that this information is held by somebody who’s not covered by the confidentiality order and they have the right to disclose it to whomever they want to? That’s possible too. As to why things would be disclosed by one side or the other, I think it’s part of getting your narrative out there. And you want the public to see what these receipts are.

Sometimes it’s designed also to show the other side the strength of your case in terms of considering settlement. mean, you want to, through anything that you do in the litigation, you want to present to the other side that you have a strong case. Hey, this is what it’s going to look like if we go to trial and you’re going to lose. And, and leaking things or disclosing things to the public, if they in fact were leaked and seeing how the public reacts to that kind of gives you real time insight into how maybe potential jurors see the issues. And if that favors one side, then they have the upper hand in the leverage in terms of negotiations and so on.

Stacy:

Well, in this case, we have sort of the extreme, right? Brian Freeman, we’ll see how it plays in the actual litigation, but in terms of the public narrative and public sentiment about Baldoni, that litigation website, that timeline, it was, it’s brilliant. It’s a masterclass actually. And I think I’m curious, you know, he is showing the other side of his case. There’s no discovery. mean, there will be discovery following up on all this, all the receipts that are published. But I’m curious about your opinions about the litigation website and the timeline in this case.

Joe:

Yeah, I think done correctly and done safely. I think it can be an effective tool. It’s, it’s sort of like your own PR piece of what’s going on here and a form of education to the public and getting your message out there besides what’s going on in the courtroom.

I think it sometimes can be done in a way that could be harmful. I have seen press releases and whether it’s a press release, whether it is an article or some other form of commentary by a lawyer or a non-lawyer about a litigation lead to a defamation lawsuit in and of itself. Lawyers are not immune. Lawyers and PR people and crisis management people are not immune from defamation lawsuits. In fact, even in this Baldoni-Lightly case, I think there are PR people who aren’t named defendants in the lawsuit for their statements.

So you have to be really careful when you put out these timelines and these press releases. The safest thing to do, and maybe perhaps this is what’s being done here, is to make sure that you are fairly and accurately reporting on what’s going on in the court proceedings with the actual documents and not adding any extra commentary that didn’t come out in the court. That way, actually, if you are threatened with defamation, can rely on what’s called the Fair Report Privilege, which is pretty much universal in all 50 states.

Anne Marie:

I think the point you just made is really critical and something that anyone thinking about undertaking this kind of effort must remember that when you put that together, all of that information needs to exist in your legal filing because if it is opinion or conjecture, or goes beyond the scope of what’s there publicly, you do open yourself up to risk. And that is a risk as the consultants that are working on it. It’s a risk as those that are filing them and to sort of anyone else that uses that information as well.

Stacy:

The other thing about the litigation website, because I had a case where there was a litigation website, which was not actually put out by the other party. was put out by an affiliate of the other party, is it creates a whole other forum, a whole other circus that you’re managing. And it drives a lot of emotion and energy at the client because they’re feeling like they want to get something out. I’m sure Anne Marie’s had this where somebody issues a press release or does something and they want to counterpunch. as the lawyer, you’re sort of like, well, we can say whatever we want in the, in the public, but we still have to try to win this case and so you need to realize that balance between dealing with that instinct to fight back.and the long-term impact it might have on your case.

Anne Marie:

I mean, at the corporate level, these become emotional because nobody wants to be perceived as trashed or on the losing end of anything even if you’ve come out strong and you’ve got a really good case and you know what your strategy is and you know what your objective is, keeping people focused on that when someone else takes an action that by nature, human nature, you want to respond to, it’s really problematic. And I think that’s where a lot of these cases go sideways is if the legal team and the PR team are not coordinated and they’re not on the same page about, well, we’re going to let this one pass. It doesn’t make sense for us to respond or no, we need to dig into this because this is materially false or really impacts our strategy.

You’ve got to run your own race and it’s hard when you’re getting bombarded all the time. And I think the Baldoni team, in my opinion, has done a pretty good job of letting some of the noise be the noise, at least from what I’ve seen in more recent reports.

Joe:

Yeah, I think there certainly has to be a level of trust between the legal team and the crisis management PR team, because if there isn’t, coming from the perspective of the legal team, it’s a distraction to worry about what the PR crisis management team is doing. The lawyer wants to focus on the case, maybe spend a little time helping on the PR side. If the PR side is overtaking the activities in the case, that does become a distraction.

The lawyers don’t want to worry about whether or not the PR people are putting things out there that are false or that are different than what’s being said in the court case. So now you have an inconsistency between what is being presented by the PR people versus what is being presented by the legal team, and by the way, those inconsistencies could be attributed to the client because they’re agents of the client.

Anne Marie:

Something that I have come to learn is key is having language that is approved by legal ahead of time so that comms can move in a rapid manner because it is faster. We do have to move faster and sometimes react to things more quickly, but making sure that both the strategic considerations and the actual language being used are things that are pre-approved so that

I can move fast without saying, Stacy, Joe, let’s get on the phone. got to spend 20 minutes negotiating this next statement before we get anywhere. And we already missed the moment to address the issue we need to before it’s here and gone.

Stacy:

I still think, you know, all of this goes back to a core question, which we started with, which is why, you know, what is the end goal with these lawsuits? And, you know, and I’m sure Joe, in your career, you’ve done this as well. Like, we are the lawyers. We are focused on the legal result. You wanted to file a lawsuit. Our goal is win the lawsuit.

But the client is, you know, they have a larger goal. Like they just want this problem to go away. They want to win or whatever. And the legal process can take a long time. And so there is that tension. It’s an inherent tension between Anne Marie’s work, the client’s desires and the legal goals.

Joe:

Well, you know, the goals of either money, refuting what is publicly said out there, deterrence, bringing light to your side. Those obviously outweigh the burdens of getting involved in a court case in this situation for both sides because, you know, Ms. Lively didn’t have to bring her suit and Mr. Baldoni, he didn’t have to bring his counter suit either. But they weighed the burdens of being involved in a long and expensive litigation against not doing anything. And they decided they had to do something.

And speaking of the delays of litigation, that is something that a lot of clients don’t immediately appreciate. Civil court cases take a very long time. Clients may think that, well, I’m going to file this lawsuit and we’re going to get this effective relief and then it’s going to be done with and I can move on to other things. Rarely does it happen in short order. Most court cases, you have two, three, four years before you get a resolution. I don’t think clients quite appreciate that at the outset.

Stacy:

They definitely don’t. can tell you having managed several high profile strategic lawsuits that, you know, every time I would report there was just like, why is this still going on? Why does it take forever? And it’s, it’s, it’s completely out of your hands.

That’s why I keep going back to the why, you know, especially on the Lively side of things. I feel like Baldoni didn’t have a choice. Who even knew this guy before this whole kerfuffle, right? Like we didn’t even, I never heard of him. And now, you know, he’s been defamed as a me too, you know, as a sexual predator, apparently. And then, you know, he has no choice but to take the gloves off.

Joe:

Well, I didn’t know anything about this movie, but…

Stacy:

I had no desire to see the movie, but I watched it. But so by the way, I asked Anne Marie and her team, like, do we have data on if the movie has gotten more views or more popular because of this whole nightmare?

Anne Marie:

I watched it because of this. I wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s interesting. It was a book and it’s a two part series and the people that read the book and saw the movie didn’t like the movie. The people that didn’t read the book but saw the movie generally thought it was an interesting story and this was supposed to be a two film series.

So to go back to Joe’s potential theory of was this all orchestrated, maybe there is a quote settlement that is them coming together and rekindling all this and then having a second film and putting a bow on it. Now I’m not sure that I believe that, but never say never. I mean, we’ve seen people orchestrate PR stunts that are far more convoluted and creative than this.

But the thing that I come back to too on the why is they’re really dragging both of their own reputations through the mud in doing this. If it was orchestrated, I think there is a much more reasonable way to have approached it.

Stacy:

Yeah. I mean, Joe, in particular, like what else did Baldoni have? You know, I think that what’s interesting to me here is that this is one of the first, you know, counter punches to a MeToo case. You know, it was sort of starting in 2017 me too. You know, people are canceled. Like we don’t want to see Mario Batali. We don’t want to see any of these people again. Right. And here Baldoni is hitting back, which is just, you know, unheard of. So I’’m curious about your thoughts about that.

Joe:

It’s certainly a high profile example of pushing back on, on this type of allegation in the, in the MeToo era, but it’s not, it’s not the first time.

And in fact, there’s, there may even be more high profile examples of something like this, whether you’re a person on the left or whether you’re a person on the right, all you need to do is look at our current president. And when he was accused of similar type wrongdoing, he pushed back with his defamation lawsuit, Stormy Daniels. He kind of pushed back on her allegations and was able to have that case dismissed. And he actually was awarded a attorneys fees in that case for what happened.

But he also has been on the other end and E. Jean Carroll has been successful in her claims against him. But I think the concept of pushing back against somebody accusing you of wrongdoing, whether it’s sexual misconduct or something of the like, that has happened in the past before and will continue to happen. This is just one of those high profile instances and we’ll see how it shakes out in the end.

Anne Marie:

I think that raises an important point if you’re thinking about the calculus of taking on a case of any kind, but one particularly where there’s going to be media attention is you have to meet the moment. Five years ago, MeToo cases were very different than they are now, the culture around us is different. We’ve sort of had this cultural arc and we’re in the pendulum swing of where we started hard on one side, we’ve gone hard to the other and I think in the next couple of years, things will sort of level out and we’ll move on to whatever the next cultural and social movement of the day is.

But meeting the moment matters. And the idea that these cases happen in a vacuum is completely false. And I think one of the jobs that the three of us have in these types of situations is weighing all of that to say, yeah, the moment might be right for you to bring this case and have it be successful or maybe not. Let’s explore other options.

Joe:

Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. And your pendulum analogy is perfect for where we are right now because we certainly were on one, what do you call it, extreme or not. And now we’re on perhaps a different extreme. In the end, it’ll be somewhere in the middle, but there’s always a place for bringing claims in suit to defend what’s being said against you. And there’s a place for that outside of court in the context of what you guys do.

Anne Marie:

Do you think that this case ever makes it to trial? Well, odds are it doesn’t. Most lawsuits settle, certainly settle when you have sophisticated parties on both sides who weigh the cost benefit. And I don’t necessarily mean the money, but weigh the cost benefit of going the distance. This one, I’m not so sure because there are a lot of people involved, a lot of passionate people involved. Sometimes the passion overrides the kind of business sense of continuing to pursue the litigation. And while most cases, civil litigation does settle, there’s a track record of some fairly recent defamation cases that have gone the distance to trial. We’ve got the Johnny Depp case. I think Cardi B was involved in a defamation case. We’ve got the election workers against Giuliani, that was tried. We’ve got the Sandy Hook cases against Alex Jones. Those were tried.

A lot of things go into the mix as to whether or not something will end up going to trial. This one may have those features.

Stacy:

Lawyers always talk about, you know, the reputation of the lawyer on the other side or, you know, Joe’s known for blah, blah, blah, or Joe’s hard to deal with and sort of the, you know, demeanor and the tactics of the reputation of the other lawyer. It becomes such a big part, I think of the calculus in managing the case. And, you know, there’s a lot of flashy names that people know. I’m not going to list them here. And I think folks are perceived as, you know, being good lawyers because they’ve got big brands. But then when the lawyers are in their little, little caucus, a lot of times like, so-and-so is a terrible, terrible in court. They never win.

You know, I wonder about advice you might have for folks when they are choosing counsel in these type of cases.

Joe:

Flashy lawyers can be good. Flashy lawyers can be not so good. My view is experience matters. How many times has this lawyer handled that type of case? That’s number one. And number two, what is that lawyer’s reputation within the legal community? Because that means a lot too. Lawyers respect other lawyers who are good and are playing by the rules.

Whether a lawyer is on TV or not doesn’t really matter too much to me one way the other, frankly. And the same is true for whether or not a lawyer has a high win rate versus a lawyer that has a low win rate. There are lawyers, self-included, that have won cases that they should have lost. They’ve lost cases they should have won. Who the lawyer is is really not a, you know, maybe people disagree, in my opinion, not a determined factor.

The determined factor are the facts. The facts don’t change no matter who the lawyer is. Now, can a lawyer screw up a case and then it’s worth nothing? Yes, but assuming that there’s no negligence involved by a lawyer, the facts of the case and how those facts are weaved into a story are the most important.

Anne Marie:

Joe, is there anything else you would like to let the Reputation Nation listeners know about defamation or you or anything?

Joe:

I’m often asked, well, defamation cases, they are just on the rise. That may be the case, or it may just be that defamation cases are more visible now than they used to be. Simply because people are communicating more and spreading information about these types of cases online. What I will agree with is that given the expansion of online and internet speech, compared to say where it was 15 years ago, 20 years ago, that increases the rise of there being some reputational harm to someone who then may want to bring a defamation claim. But it also increases the odds of somebody being accused of defamation, whether they’ve been correctly accused or incorrectly accused.

And those things give rise to more of these issues that we’re talking about more today than we ever did before.

Stacy:

That’s it for this episode of Reputation Nation. Thanks for joining us. We hope you found this episode useful. Have a crisis you want to dissect on a future episode? Connect with us on LinkedIn or email us at RepNat@dezenhall.com.

Anne Marie:

Want to learn more about navigating a corporate crisis or high stakes lawfare situation? Or want more hot takes from us? Subscribe to Des Reads and our take at dezenhall.com

And be sure to check out Stacy’s The Legal Department podcast for more legal insights at LegalDepartmentPod.com. Thanks for listening. See you next time in the Reputation Nation.

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