Don’t Let Attorneys Write Your Press Releases

From Tennessee, we have another news story showing why attorneys should not craft press responses, or at least attorneys who are not experts in the field involved. Two anonymous women have filed suit against a church in Maryville, Tennessee, alleging that the church covered up their complaints of abuse when the two women were children attending the church. The newspaper covering the lawsuit emailed questions to the church, and the church attorney responded:

“Your questions contain allegations from three anonymous women of events alleged to have occurred in (a list of years has been redacted Knox News to protect the identities of the alleged victims), two of which involve serious allegations known to the women’s parents against 18-year-old boys who were not acting on behalf of First Apostolic Church," Trent said. "Yet there are clear insinuations that the church had some legal duty regarding those matters. Any such suggestion is false.”

There are two problems with this response. First, attorneys tend to lay out their legal defenses, and that habit rarely works out well. An experienced public relations person would know that the average person would read this legal defense as an attempt to blame the victims’ families (as the newspaper did). There are plenty of valid legal doctrines that work in litigation or in the courtroom, but don’t belong in the PR arena. This argument about what the girls’ parents knew and when they knew it is one of those doctrines.

The second problem is that the response is factually wrong.  Tennessee is an “everyone reports” state, specifically requiring that "any person who has knowledge of" potential abuse is obligated to report it. That statute stretches back several decades, and presumably covered the years that these two women were minors in the church. Either the attorney doesn’t know mandated reporting law, or he’s relying on an exception that he doesn’t set out in his response.

Youth organizations facing these nightmare situations need good PR help. Yes, your lawyer will want to vet any public statements. But don’t ask us to get outside our lane by writing them or being the only author. Our lawyerly skill sets do not translate well to other situations.