Lanny Davis is drawing on his experience handling crises for the Clinton White House to launch a blog that will advise corporate clients on how to navigate “high profile legal, personal and political controversies.”
The Fox-friendly Democratic operative will team up with two other staffers at McDermott, Will, and Emery, the DC law and lobbying firm where he works, to write “Legal Crisis Strategies.” According to an announcement by the firm, the blog will offer clients “total solutions” for handling crises, including “litigation skills and fact finding,” “strategic messages and extensive experience in dealing with the media,” and “legislative and lobbying strategies.”
When we last caught up with Davis over the summer, he was signing on to lobby for Honduran business leaders who were seeking to convince the U.S. Congress that it should support, rather than oppose, the government that was installed in a military coup last year.* In 2008, Davis, a tireless backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to push the Reverend Wright story.
In what appears to be the new blog’s lone post so far, Davis’s McDermott colleague, Eileen O’Connor, gives a glimpse of the kind of insights on offer. She writes:
You are the General Counsel of a major corporation about to go to your son’s soccer game. It’s five to five and the phone rings: The New York Times is about to go with a story about your secret merger negotiations, that also involve sensitive talks with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Your stomach clenches. It’s a full blown crisis….and it’s bad…or is it?
It isn’t necessarily, O’Connor opines. That’s because it’s what you do in response to the situation, not the situation itself, that will determine the ultimate result.
Similar nuggets of strategic advice are said to be forthcoming on the site — but perhaps not quite at the warp speed that internet users have grown accustomed to. According to the firm’s announcement, the blog “will be posted every Monday morning.”
* This sentence has been edited from the original.
