Dan Abrams on the Media and the Law
Dan Abrams was the keynote speaker for our annual Convention. Linda Franklin, our director at the South Carolina Trial Lawyer’s Association has done a fabulous job of getting speakers. Before Dan, we had Tom Mesereau, Mark Geragos, Wolf Blitzer and John Dean. Dan gave is with MSNBC and covered all of the big legal ‘media events’ in the last ten year. Dan made two good points.
If you have a case where there’s a media circus, the lawyer needs to get in front of the media and manage it. Of course, when talking about the media, there is only so much you can ‘manage’ them, but at least you can direct them somewhat. The example Dan gave was the Jon Benet Ramsey case. With their first legal team, the Ramsey’s kept mum and didn’t take a proactive approach to the media.
The second point Dan made was that if you talk to the media, it’s important to talk to the media. Talking to the media and then stonewalling, is much worse than refusing to talk in the first place. The example Dan gave was the Gary Condit case. Gary Condit went on television and did an interview and talked about everything except what people wanted to hear about his relationship with Chandra Levy. Gary kept saying “I don’t want to talk about that out of concern for the Levy family”… That actually makes the situation worse.
Thanks for coming and talking to us Dan.
