Lanny J. Davis, Eileen M. O'Connor and McDermott Lawyers Launch "Legal Crisis Strategies" Blog

Prominent Washington, D.C. practicing attorneys and legal crisis strategists, Lanny J. Davis and Eileen O’Connor, of McDermott Will & Emery LLP, have launched a new Blog – "Legal Crisis Strategies" – offering weekly insights based on their unique triad of "legal crisis management" disciplines that finds clients total solutions – namely, (1) litigation skills and fact finding, protected by attorney-client privilege, (2) strategic messages and extensive experience in dealing with the media, and (3) Washington, D.C. legislative and lobbying strategies before Congress, regulatory agencies and the Executive Branch.

"We will call upon the unique combination of these three disciplines at McDermott performed by practicing attorneys with the confidentiality protection of attorney-client privilege – which we believe does not exist at any other law firm under one roof – to offer weekly examples of how that combination can be most effective when companies and individuals face high profile legal, personal and political controversies," Davis and O'Connor said.

The new Blog, which will be posted every Monday morning, can be found at http://www.LegalCrisisStrategies.com/.

Co-editing the Blog will be McDermott partner, Stephen Ryan, a former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, with extensive experience in defending clients during congressional investigations, who heads the Firm's Washington, D.C. Government Strategies Practice Group.

Also serving as regular "Contributors" to McDermott's Legal Crisis Strategies Blog will be William Weld, former two-term Massachusetts Governor and U.S. Attorney; Bobby Burchfield, a well known trial lawyer and election law specialist who heads McDermott's Washington, D.C. office; and Peg Warner, who leads McDermott's Firm-wide litigation and intellectual property practices."

The Legal Crisis Strategies Blog will offer advice on such topics as how to develop facts working with lawyers who are protected by attorney-client privilege, but with a perspective of what resonates and works with the media; how to talk to reporters using various ground rules – such as "background," "deep background," or off-the-record guidance; how to get out in front of a negative story and develop good facts that can restore reputations and limit legal liability; how to reduce the effects of "bad news" for a public company by greater transparency, while avoiding prejudicial statements that add to legal risk; how to react to an unfair regulatory agency prosecution – by using litigation, media, and lobbying to put the public focus on regulatory or prosecutorial excess; how to use media and transparency to thwart a "short and distort" attack; how to perform a "crisis audit" to identify ticking time bombs of potential legal and business problems and defuse them before the bad news breaks, rather than waiting until after; how to use attorneys with media experience to change "facts on the ground" in order to mitigate the reputational and legal effects of the bad news when the story is inevitably going to break; and other topics relating to dealing with legal, political, and other high profile controversies.

Mr. Davis and Ms. O’Connor began and developed the unique Legal Crisis Communications Group nearly ten years ago after Davis served as Special Counsel to President Clinton in 1996-98, serving as a White House press person and attorney regarding various congressional campaign finance investigations. O'Connor met Davis at that time, through her reporting duties as a White House Correspondent for CNN. Davis also served from 2006-07 as a member of President George W. Bush's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

Mr. Davis, a graduate of Yale College and Law School, has appeared on every major Sunday network news program and cable TV station during his service in the Clinton White House Counsel in 1996-98, as well as since then. His op-ed pieces have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers and has been a frequent political analyst on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He is currently publishing a regular weekly published column every Thursday in The Hill newspaper called "Purple Nation." In 1999, Davis authored a memoir on his White House crisis communications experience, called "Truth To Tell: Tell It All, Tell It Early, Tell It Yourself" (The Free Press) and in 2006, he authored "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America."

Before becoming an attorney, O'Connor was an award-winning journalist for 24 years, first with ABC News and then with CNN spending 16 years overseas, based in London, Moscow and Tokyo, covering the fall of Communism, organized crime in the former Soviet Union and conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya. O'Connor also worked as President of the International Center for Journalists, a non-profit organization that teaches quality journalism worldwide through hands-on training by journalists. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law and advises Governors, Mayors, federal, state and local officials on incident response through an executive training program run by the Naval Post-Graduate School (NPS). O'Connor has appeared on CNN, ABC, and Fox as an expert on Russian politics, US/Russia relations and journalistic ethics. O'Connor is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, Georgetown School of Business and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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