Firms are assembling multidisciplinary teams to help clients anticipate, navigate and contain crises before they explode

In October 2017, a shooter opened fire on an outdoor concert crowd near Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds more. Debra Wong Yang, who represented Mandalay Bay’s then-owner, MGM Resorts International, was one of the first lawyers on the scene. “Try to imagine absolute mayhem,” says Yang, the co-chair of the crisis management practice group at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. “They didn’t know whether there was another suspect. They didn’t know what had happened yet.” Helping a company’s decision-makers explain an unexpected situation to their employees, their stakeholders and the market is often the first step in responding to a crisis, says Yang, who has guided clients through many other high-profile incidents, including massive product recalls, complex government investigations and deadly industrial accidents. “Not only are you dealing with all the potential legal issues, but you’re dealing with the company being asked to respond immediately,” Yang says. “You’re having to manage that as the lawyer because you don’t want them to create additional liability down the road.” Gibson Dunn is one of many firms that have made crisis management a top priority. Across the legal profession, lawyers like Yang are establishing and joining niche teams that help companies avoid potential crises or address sudden or unfolding crises. They aim to not only minimize legal risks, but risks to their clients’ reputation and business. Many of these teams include former prosecutors and government officials who bring their experience with federal and state investigations and enforcement actions. Yang herself is a former prosecutor, judge and police commissioner. Teams also include lawyers from a range of practice areas, including labor and employment, health care, privacy and cybersecurity. As Morgan, Lewis & Bockius was building its crisis management team, the diverse experience of its attorneys was a top factor, says David McManus, the chair-elect of the firm. “Over the last several years, we recognized that we have this depth of expertise and that any crisis generally requires a multidisciplinary approach,” says McManus, a labor and employment lawyer based in Morgan Lewis’ New York City and Boston offices. “That coalesced into putting together a more formal group that we can present to clients as a resource.” Lawyers like Yvette Ostolaza, the chair of Sidley Austin’s management committee, also find that working with clients on certain matters naturally lends itself to assisting them during crises. For her, those matters include handling shareholder and securities litigation and complex internal investigations. “Once you’re involved in investigations for companies that involve the C-suite and advising boards on their activist and shareholder issues, you’re dealing with so many constituencies that it starts morphing into different issues,” Ostolaza says. “You start getting called for more crises.” A crisis is typically multidimensional, garners media attention and threatens an individual or company’s reputation or finances, according to Yang, a partner at Gibson Dunn’s Los Angeles office. As one example, she is handling a situation involving a CEO whose behavior led to multiple investigations, including by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice. It also sparked investigations by several state attorneys general and various litigation matters. “It all hit the company literally within a month,” Yang says. “So the key component of a crisis, to me, isn’t just ‘Can you solve this and solve it well?’ It’s having the ability to manage it across the landscape, where everything you do has repercussions.” While crisis management teams offer clients lawyers with varying experience, they also leverage relationships with outside consultants, McManus says. This could include public relations, environmental or regulatory consultants. Other resources are cybersecurity experts, executive coaches and even grief counselors. In addition to preparing for and containing crises, lawyers work to reduce the possibility of recurring incidents, McManus notes. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, he helped clients revise their human resources models to reflect the demands of their employees. “Particularly in the employment area, what we’ve seen since #MeToo is how sociocultural events impact the workplace, impact employees and then ultimately impact business operations for a client,” McManus says. Law firms are not immune to crises and benefit from the services offered by their peers’ crisis management teams. In recent years, McManus has guided several firms in the Am Law 100 through challenges related to the #MeToo movement, the COVID-19 pandemic and President Donald Trump’s administration. “We have always been engaged for law firms, but over the last two or three years, that has exponentially increased,” McManus says. Shifts in the political climate have changed how some law firms approach crisis prevention and response. Rich Gold, the leader emeritus of the public policy & regulation group at Holland & Knight, focuses on political risk management, which he describes as different than the traditional practice. In the lead-up to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, Gold heard from corporate clients who needed to formulate internal and external responses to the decision. He saw this again amid pushback to companies’ environmental, social and governance policies and diversity, equity and inclusion policies. In other cases, Gold helps companies that are launching new products anticipate blowback from groups on the left and right sides of the political divide. In the current environment, they often need to plan for negative reactions from differing camps within each party, he says. “A lot of what we do is scenario planning,” says Gold, a partner in Holland & Knight’s Washington, D.C., office. “In the olden days, we would think about this from the perspective of ‘We want to take our product to market. It could be opposed by folks on the right for this reason and by folks on the left for this reason.’ Today, that’s not the case. You’re in a situation where you can’t do scenario planning with just two scenarios. You have to do scenario planning with, like, seven scenarios.” Lawyers on crisis management teams also stay current with developments in technology, both because of how they could lead to a crisis and how they could get their clients out of one. “The stakes are becoming larger and more global in nature,” says Ostolaza, a partner in Sidley Austin’s Dallas office. “We continue to invest in training and using AI-enabled tools to ensure we can move quickly through documents and other issues when developing crisis plans for clients.” In the past decade, Ostolaza’s team has responded to varying challenges, including congressional inquiries, airplane crashes and kidnappings. She describes it as a “24/7 practice,” adding that once lawyers are in the middle of an evolving crisis, they could be on call for days. “There are a lot of people out there who are doing the same thing they did when they were fourth-year lawyers,” Ostolaza says. “I can rest assured that for our team that handles this work, that is definitely not the case.”