Reputation Protection

Our team is renowned as leaders in the field for defending reputations, privacy and confidentiality wherever and whenever problems arise. Clients tell us they value the speed of our response, the rigour with which we fight their corner and the creative strategies we deliver in difficult situations.

Our leading defamation and privacy lawyers have decades of experience handling the full range of media law issues for prominent individuals and businesses. Our approach to media law issues is particularly successful due to our strategic approach that all of our teams follow - focusing on what the cause of a problem is and what will get the result needed.

We work closely with clients, their retained legal teams and often their communications advisors to identify what needs to be achieved and find a way to deliver it which matches how they do business.

We cover the full range of reputation protection work, including:

• Support before publication or broadcast dealing with allegations.
• Challenging false and erroneous content, including on social media and search engines.
• Identifying and challenging dirty tricks campaigns, including tactical litigation to reveal the identities of nefarious actors.
• Right to be forgotten and the removal of outdated content from the internet.
• Protecting confidential information and privacy, including court proceedings and injunctions.
• Sensitive litigation and countering hostile litigation PR.

Our work deals with false allegations whatever their source of medium of publication, often working with our close network of allied law firms in key territories across the globe. Through years of experience working on sensitive issues our team understands international media and campaigning approaches, and devises plans that achieve clients’ ultimate goals.

Our thinking is heavily influenced by our team’s work for media organisations as lawyers or journalists in previous jobs. We focus on the psychology of what will make the other side behave differently, and our insights into editorial motivations and processes helps us get better results.

Examples of our recent work include

• Exposing a dirty tricks campaign by a multinational business intended to prevent a client developing land in competition with them. Through tactical Court applications we proved a supposed grassroots campaign group was a front for a lobbying agency, leading to exposure of the campaign in the national press.
• Preventing the publication of false allegations of law-breaking by the CEO of a listed business, and preventing disclosure of personal information concerning their family and homes.
• Removing false allegations against a FTSE 100 plc from a documentary, including allegations of breaching data protection rules and staff misconduct.
• Acting for a Middle Eastern-owned group of companies to prevent disclosure of confidential information stolen by an IT contractor, including preventing the press from publishing it.
• Litigation to force the Daily Mail to apologise to the CEO and founder of a listed business for falsely accusing him of misconduct.