Mastering Crises: A GC's Playbook on Leadership for Turbulent Times

The Role of Law Firms in Crisis Management

Crisis prevention and management has become a top priority for organisations across various sectors. To understand how advanced companies are in this critical discipline, we sponsored a global Economist Impact survey of 600 primary legal decision-makers.

?The survey highlights a clear need for stronger collaborative alliances between GCs, their organisations, their law firms and other expert advisors to avoid the preventable and overcome the unavoidable. The survey reveals a worrying trend:

companies are least prepared for the crises that pose the greatest threats

Worse still, many fail to learn from past events. Over two-thirds of those surveyed said their organisations do not engage in crisis stress testing or scenario drills, missing key opportunities to improve their crisis strategies by integrating learnings from past crisis events.

Reputation Reputation Reputation

Corporate reputations are particularly vulnerable, with only around 30% of organisations having crisis communication playbooks. This gap leaves them exposed. Working together, law firms and strategic communications experts will shape crisis and litigation communication strategies, ensuring that public statements, media responses and all stakeholder engagement throughout the crisis mitigate the risks to the organisation.

Supply Chain Checkpoints

Supply chains are another significant risk. It will be no surprise to learn that nearly half of the respondents in North America, and slightly fewer in EMEA, are investing in supply chain redundancy plans to mitigate potential crises. Law firms can help by supporting their clients in the review and monitoring of supply chain arrangements and conducting due diligence in transactions. Extending this scrutiny to subcontractors will also help to identify legal, regulatory and business risks before they snowball.

Training for Prevention

Another key issue is insufficient crisis management training. Nearly a third of GCs report insufficient resources in this area. Post-crisis reviews, realistic simulations and board-level involvement are essential to ensure everyone understands their role during a crisis.

Law firms provide valuable input alongside other experts in areas where organisations have limited skills.

Rapid Response

The first 48 hours of a corporate crisis are critical. Emotions run high, often clouding leadership’s judgment. Again, law firms have a critical role to play as part of the GC’s standing crisis response team. With their deep understanding of a client’s crisis plans, they can help to guide decision-making in those early hours.

Twenty-three per cent of GCs cited regulatory or compliance crises as a top concern. Getting this wrong can cost organisations dearly—both financially and reputationally. With regulatory challenges on the rise, particularly in areas like AI and data, law firms enable GCs to keep up with developments by fine-tuning compliance strategies, providing tailored training and sharing best practices that benchmark compliance frameworks to set out what good looks like.

This blog is the first piece in a short series that I have called Mastering Crises: A GC's Playbook on Leadership for Turbulent Times. I hope you will revisit my page to read future posts and share your thoughts in the comments section.