by A conversation on navigating the most pressure-cooked moments in communications — from securities fraud to cybersecurity crises.
Our team interviewed our CEO & Global Managing Partner, Montieth Illingworth, about his career in crisis and litigation PR and how it has evolved as a practice group and in the firm.
How did you find your way into crisis and litigation PR specifically?
My path started in journalism. After several years as a journalist and author, I moved into public relations in 1995, initially representing governments in economic development marketing and media relations. Over the following decade, I led the U.S. operations of a global PR agency.
When I started my own firm, I knew I had to differentiate. Our sector had become commoditized, and I wanted to take a new direction. For me, that meant leaning hard into issues management, crisis communications, and litigation PR. The stakes are obvious, the intensity is real, and I had something not everyone in this field has: genuine insight into how newsrooms work, from having been inside one.
That background has been central to everything we’ve done since. Understanding journalistic process and newsroom priorities — what an editor will prioritize, how a reporter constructs a story, what they’re actually looking for — is still, to this day, one of the most important tools in managing a crisis and protecting a client’s reputation.
What kinds of crisis matters has your firm handled over the years?
The range is significant. We’ve worked on everything from the Madoff fraud to the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, Nazi-looted art recovery for descendant families, CEO terminations, and cybersecurity crises. A substantial portion of our work touches on securities laws, but we’ve handled a wide range of other matters as well.
What’s consistent across all of it is that we always try to ensure we can be proud of the work — doing the right thing, for the right clients, aligned with our personal and corporate values. That filter matters a great deal in this area of practice.
How do you decide which crisis clients to take on?
We vet all of our clients carefully, not based on how challenging the matter might be, but on the reputational integrity of the client and the organization. Bad things can happen to good people and good organizations — that’s very different from working with someone whose decisions are, on their face, simply wrong, ethically and morally, let alone legally.
It’s not always black and white. You always learn more as you go deeper into a matter than you knew at the outset. When that happens, the question becomes: does what I’m learning change my conclusion about integrity, and if so, by how much — and what do I do about it? Those are the hardest decisions.
My default is always to give the client my best and most honest advice, even when it’s very difficult for them to hear. That’s the real test of professional integrity, for both parties.
What’s something you learned early in your career that still shapes how you work in a crisis?
Early on, I failed to deliver for a client. When he came to me, what stayed with me wasn’t that I’d missed the mark — it was what he said next: what disappointed him most was that I hadn’t come to him first to flag the issue and offer a solution. That moment fundamentally shaped how I operate.
Since then, I’ve always tried to get ahead of delivery challenges and arrive with a proactive solution. In crisis work, that instinct is everything. You can’t afford to be reactive when the stakes are this high.
I also learned not to be too convinced by the opinion advanced with the most confidence. Those are often the most suspect. In a high-pressure situation, creating a consultative environment — where you can constructively stress-test views on what to do, when, and how — is essential to good decision-making.
What does effective crisis communications actually look like in practice?
No crisis plan taken off the shelf guides all the decisions you need to make — what to say, when, how, and to which stakeholders. In those moments, decision-making requires a thought process, and sometimes a real debate, that’s genuinely new for many executives.
My job in those situations is to frame what’s most important to achieve, advise on how to get there, and provide insight into how any public statement or action will land with stakeholders. Ultimately, it’s about helping organizations act with confidence while building — or restoring — trust.
One thing I’ve seen consistently: the opposing side loses credibility when they’re too aggressive, too controlling, or attempt to manage something they can’t actually control — particularly with journalists. Reporters have told me this directly. Opening a real channel of communication, asking good questions, listening, drawing appropriate boundaries, and being genuinely helpful is almost always the more effective path.
How has technology changed how you approach crisis work?
We’ve built a proprietary AI-driven system specifically for crisis and reputation work. It’s designed to hone in on stakeholder reaction to any kind of announcement or event — minor or major — and how that shapes sentiment and either strengthens or erodes trust over time.
It was built on decades of crisis experience and gives us a systematic, contextualized view that supports predictive analysis. Combined with professional judgment, it takes decision-making to a different level — more informed, more precise, and faster. I’ll never need a machine to tell me what to think. But I very much like smart machines.
What makes your firm’s approach to crisis and litigation PR different?
Two things, primarily. First, our ability to operate globally. We work across more than 20 media markets, and that’s not just a capability — it’s a genuine differentiator in crisis work, where a story can cross borders instantly and stakeholder audiences are rarely confined to one country.
Second, the depth of experience we bring to the boardroom and to interactions with in-house and external legal counsel. Crisis communications at this level requires navigating extremely complex organizational dynamics. We understand how boards think, how GCs operate, and how to bring communications strategy into alignment with legal strategy in a way that serves the client’s interests in both dimensions.
We’ve learned how to punch above our weight — and the results bear that out.