Communications Lessons for High-Stakes Cases

John is joined by Andrew Frank, Founder and President of KARV.  They discuss the evolving role of strategic communications in legal and other public relations “crisis” situations. KARV focuses on strategic advisory services, particularly in high-stakes litigation, crisis response, and public policy matters.  Roughly half of the firm's work involves law-related matters, including disputes, investigations, and regulatory issues.  KARV operates internationally, with offices in major U.S. cities and partnerships around the globe.

Early engagement is crucial in crisis communication planning.  Ideally, engagement begins before a crisis breaks.  However, most companies fail to prepare for crises in advance, and communications professionals are typically brought in after legal action has begun.  Once engaged, the primary goal of KARV is to support the legal team while minimizing risk.  This support includes preparing official statements, crafting consistent messaging, and developing media strategies aligned with legal objectives.  The legal and communications teams must collaborate closely to avoid missteps and ensure a unified public-facing narrative.

Clients need to understand the mechanics of media engagement, including the distinctions between on-the-record, off-the-record, and background communications.  In crisis situations, clients must also understand the expectations of different media outlets, along with the challenges of working with internal PR teams that may lack experience in crisis or litigation matters.  Common mistakes include saying too much, failing to coordinate messaging, and ignoring broader reputational concerns.

Finally, Andrew explains how artificial intelligence is affecting the communications landscape.  On the one hand, AI offers useful tools for drafting and analysis.  However, AI also raises new challenges by accelerating the spread of misinformation.  For example, a news broadcast may be assembled by an AI aggregator and delivered to the audience through an AI generated avatar without any of the content being confirmed as true.  Social media posts now appear and receive more than a thousand comments in 15 minutes;  that many comments must be generated by AI and both the comments and the original post may be fake.  The need to correct such misinformation means that human judgment and experience in managing complex communications environments will remain central, especially in high-stakes legal disputes.

Podcast Link: Law-disrupted.fm
Host: John B. Quinn
Producer: Alexis Hyde
Music and Editing by: Alexander Rossi

Transcript

Note: This transcript is generated from a recorded conversation and may contain errors or omissions. It has been edited for clarity but may not fully capture the original intent or context. For accurate interpretation, please refer to the original audio.

JOHN QUINN: This is John Quinn, and this is a Law, disrupted. Today we're speaking with Andrew Frank, who is the president and founder of Karv, formerly Karv Communications, but they've trimmed that down because they realize they do much more than just communications advice. I guess it's more generally strategic advisory advice and communications.

Would that be a fair summary, Andrew? 

ANDREW FRANK: Yeah. Well, John, thanks for having me and I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about what we do and what you guys are doing and that kind of thing in this world. We do focus on strategic advisory and communications advice. Our work tends to touch on communications, but we recognized a few years ago that we weren't just doing communications. And a lot of people think of communications, they think of just PR, the true sense of public relations. And we've been doing so much more of that over the last decade. The firm is 13 years old and we just kind of realized that things have been moving in a different direction. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, my sense is from a litigator standpoint, I think communication, there's a recognition. 

Communication has always been important. You know, you're communicating, even if you're not communicating, you may be communicating badly, but you're leaving space out there. You're not telling you’re story, you're letting other people tell your story. To me, there's been a greater recognition on the part of clients and lawyers and others involved in dispute resolution and legal issues generally about the importance of communications.

We spoke a little bit before we started the podcast today, and I know that you're based in New York. You have offices and relationships also in Los Angeles, in Miami. You're gonna be opening in Riyadh, depending upon the needs that you're facing. You have 20 full-time professionals and you can expand up to an additional 15 or more, contract people on different assignments, and that you're engaged in, communications projects all over the world teaming with other communications firms in other locations. You've told me that about 50% of your work is law related, dispute related regulatory investigation, government facing kinds of issues, and the rest tends to be sort of public policy and consulting on public issues, and the like, you know, is that a fair summary? I just wanted to get that all out of the way so the listeners understood who we're talking to. 

ANDREW FRANK: Absolutely. Yeah. That's a pretty fair summary. I would just add a couple of points. I mean, we've worked in over 60 countries. We've worked in almost every state, so besides that core that you talked about, our owned offices and our partnership that we have in Los Angeles, we've actually built this network around the world.

And so you know, for instance, we're part of something called the Crisis and Litigators Communicating Alliance, which has 10 offices around Europe as well as Korea. So we can tap into that group. We're part of my former company that I'm still in, you know, very good relationships with, and have offices in about 20 countries.

And so depending upon the need, we've been able to partner with a number of different people and find the right partner for the right issue. And, you know, as you know, litigation or legal work or sudden crisis work, it demands very quick response, very quick timing, and also people who are experienced.

And I think that too often some of the bigger firms tend to say, okay, well let's just, you know, go with that office in London, for instance. But that office in London doesn't do anything crisis related or litigation related. So I think clients and law firms are starting to get smarter about how to use firms like ours.

JOHN QUINN: I think that's absolutely true. But, so, you know, there's so many ways to start this discussion. I was thinking about asking you what have you seen as mistakes that you've made or what are best practices, but why don't we begin by talking about you know, how you get involved, what your initial assignments tends to be in a perfect case. When would you like to get involved? When do you think you can add the most value? And how do you, I mean, in every case, a challenge I assume is what's the story that is gonna be presented to the public and how do you, starting from zero, come to arrive at what that messaging should be, what's the process like?

How are you, who are you dealing with? And I mean, do you work with focus groups to try to find out, you know, what might get the most traction? You know, how do you decide? 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, first of all, that's a really big spectrum, right? So, if I was to start off with a couple of different, more example cases, I suppose you could say, sometimes we will come with the client where the client says, I have an issue, you know, we've worked with them before. They might have a legal problem and they say, hey, you know, we need some advice, can you find a legal firm for us? Okay, and at the same time, we may be brought in, from the legal firm or from the client themselves.

Generally through the GC that says we need to have somebody that can work with us for the messaging. Often times, I think there's a confusion because let's just say Company X has a PR firm. Well, company X sells pens as an example, or coffee, so they have a B2C law firm, B2C PR firm, either external or internal.

They're doing that. They don't have any knowledge base, how to deal with a potential crisis or litigation. So how we would like to get in, certainly there's, sometimes a crisis preparation for a client, and so they know us from that. Historically that happens rarely because most companies, unless you're a big bank or an oil company or an airliner, don't really think that there's gonna be a crisis coming.

So there's a lot of lack of preparation for having a crisis plan. So we generally get brought in the day or the day after a lawsuit happens on the defense side. And from that, it's very quick to say, okay, is there a message that we're saying, well, right away pushing back, or are we waiting for filings?

And often times when we work together with the lawyers, first of all, our main principle is do no harm, because, we don't want you guys to walk into court and the judge to say, I've seen all this stuff. This is, you know, BS and locks everybody down. Nobody can talk to the media.

Whatever you've said is wrong and or it has broader implications on the potential to make things bigger. So when we come in, we take a look at what might be existing. We generally work hand in hand with the lawyers because we wanna make sure that we're all on the same page.

Because we've been doing this for 25 years, we feel pretty confident that we can push back a little bit. You know, we're not lawyers. I've worked a lot with lawyers over the years, but I think we have a sense and understanding of what you wanna accomplish, right? And so that no harm concept is really important.

So to answer your question about when we wanna come in, well, we'd like to come in beforehand because then you could prepare one. Often times that doesn't happen. Most of the time that doesn't happen. The only time that that happens actually is we do a lot of product recall cases. So lawyers are generally brought in first.

And then they're gonna be going to the CPSC or NHTSA or FDA to do a recall, and they recognize we've been working with another, a number of the groups that they recognize need a communication support before it goes public. So we do have that time to prepare for those aspects of it. 

JOHN QUINN: I mean, there's sometimes a tension between what the lawyer feels they need to tell the court and what you think the optimal message to the public and the largest, the larger business community is. I mean, I know a lot of times when we're writing a brief, there's so much that goes into that preliminary statement. Yep, we're thinking you've gotta get the reader's attention right in the beginning.

That first paragraph. That first sentence, and the paragraphs that follow, are usually so carefully crafted because of the importance of that early messaging, do you sometimes get involved in reviewing that and from the standpoint of a PR perspective? Because yeah, I assume a lot of members of the media, they're not gonna get past the preliminary statement a hundred percent.

We'll actually, you know, take a look, make some suggested edits, maybe moving paragraph 27 to paragraph 44, because somebody, somehow it got buried in the context. At the same time, also, if you are gonna go to the media, because not all the time do you go to the media.

Not all the time do you want to go to the media, but if you are gonna go to the media, whether it's proactively or reactively with whatever it is you're filing, you wanna be able to point them to those paragraphs because they're not gonna read a 50 page brief and 250 pages of exhibits. They're just not doing it right.

You know, they're gonna read, please show me the 10 paragraphs that are most important, and is there one exhibit I should read? 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah.

ANDREW FRANK: At the most. So you're right. It is very crafted. And often times we'll go in and we'll work with the lawyers. Sometimes we just work with the law firms and the lawyers, as opposed to just, you know, we're just an adjunct of you. Right. Not even really working on the client side yet, because maybe there isn't a need. So we've been brought in sometimes from law firms, lawyers that want us to take a look at the brief because they think it might have public ramifications or it might be a problem with some regulator groups and you know, we have different relationships and they'll bring us on for that.

They let the client know, but at the same time, they're not looking to do something proactive. 

JOHN QUINN: I mean, who's best to speak to the press? Is it somebody like you? Is it an in-house person? Is it the lawyer? I think I know what you're gonna tell me, all, all of the above. Well, it depends, I thought you were gonna say it depends on the circumstances.

ANDREW FRANK: Well, it depends on this hundred percent. Depends on the circumstance, but I would say all of the above because I mean, first of all, sometimes the lawyer's the best placed person to talk. If you're in court and you're going outta court. That's just a no brainer, right? Because you've already argued in front of the judge, you've argued in the case and you're walking out the door and a journalist is gonna ask you, well, there's no reason for a spokesperson or somebody from the company to be doing that.

JOHN QUINN: Well, I mean, sometimes I've had people like yourself running interference. I mean, we'll agree beforehand, I need to get out of there. Oh yeah. The judge may not want to read about me commenting on what's happened in court and it might be better for somebody like you to do that. 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, I mean, I think there's two parts of that, right?

One is that we're running interference to say we're not gonna be talking to the press. Right? Right. So it gets you out of the room, right? Yeah. 'cause  it gets you outta that everything I said was in court and that's it, we're not gonna say more.  Of course, there's maybe the decision to say, hey, you know what, you, we gotta provide a lot more background.

And there's some journalists that are just not getting it. And so therefore, either on the way outta court or just in general by reaching out to them that we're providing background information. I tend to like it when the lawyers are the ones who are speaking, particularly when there's a court issue, when it's not going to court and you're just filing papers and you have to deal with the media in a different capacity where they're, you know, they're calling up. You want a place to call and you want a place to vet it, which would therefore go to us. And then, oftentimes we will do it, not necessarily on the record, we would do it as background, right, the filings, if that's the case. If there's one single point of view or perspective or let's say one message, maybe it's two sentences, then we would say a spokesperson for. I think often times we don't, the client often times doesn't wanna do it. They don't wanna get involved unless it's a real public issue where the CEO feels reputationally and collectively we agree that reputationally, it's the CEO that’s gotta show his employees, he's gotta show his customers that he's either standing up or doing A, B, and C.

And so that happens quite often, particularly in some crisis situations where it may be going to litigation, but it's not there yet and the CEO or a company spokesman really is the appropriate person. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, sometimes things are happening fast and you don't know how things are going to play out and you don't want to take a position.

So sometimes you just have to make a kind of placeholder, right? That's right, a holding statement. Tell me about that. 

ANDREW FRANK: Yeah, well, I think one of the things that we do on every single case we work through is putting together a Q and A, putting together a holding statement finding what is, what is it that, what's the most important things we wanna say, in the course of, you guys are gonna be saying, okay, litigation.

All the way we're going into court. These are my points. This is my opening statement. What's your opening statement? How do we build upon that? And maybe there's something we are gonna be working on together because that opening statement is gonna be penultimate for potentially the coverage. We don't wanna say anything different than you are gonna say because we have to support the legal strategy in order for it to succeed.

Right. I think that being prepared is absolutely the case. So Q and A’s holding statement, which you know, generally times holding statements are only a couple paragraphs at the most because reporters aren't covering statement. 

JOHN QUINN: An example of that would be basically that, you know, this has happened.

It's obviously a serious matter. We're looking into it, we take it seriously, this is gonna play out. We look forward to proving our case, whatever. Something like that. 

ANDREW FRANK: Exactly. You know, safety is a priority. You know, the company is very concerned about all of its employees and or all of its customers.

Something like that, exactly. 

JOHN QUINN: Right, so for people who don't have a lot of experience at what you do and working with the media, Andrew, what are some of the protocols, agreements, that one can have with members of the media? I mean, you've mentioned one, that is to say background only. I know there's different levesl of tiers to this. Could you walk us? Yeah. Those of us who don't live with this stuff, tell us what these different code phrases mean. 

ANDREW FRANK: So it's funny that you say that because I was having this conversation earlier today with one of our colleagues and she used to be a journalist and we were discussing the whole issue of you know, the record, off the record. Right, so those are the general three buckets, right? Yeah. So if it's on the record, if whoever it is that's speaking, if you're saying, if you're talking to a journalist and you don't say to them at the beginning. And this is a really important part,if you're talking to a journalist, even if he's a really good friend of yours and he's interested in what you're talking about, if you don't say, hey John, it's off the record, everything that you say is quotable. 

JOHN QUINN: And the other thing is he's gotta say yes, I agree, because that's right. We were actually involved in a case. I'm just trying to think if it became public dispute, it did. I mean, it was a case for Elon Musk where somebody said, you know, this is off the record.

But there was no claim, I never agreed to that. Yeah, you said that. But I never agreed to it. 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, you know that’s a little sneaky from the journalists. Okay, because if you say that, this is off the record now, the key part of it is you can't be on the record for 20 minutes and then say, this is off the record.

You can't, that's hard because journalists are gonna say, unless they are gonna, you can do it and you, but therefore you have to. Exactly, to your point, the journalist has to say, okay. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: Okay and don't assume that.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, I mean, the anecdote for that always is, this is off the record, right, Fred?

Exactly, you agree, right? This is off the record. 

ANDREW FRANK: That's right. That's exactly right. Otherwise you're gonna go down that path where they're gonna say, wait, you know, look, we just talked for 20 minutes, you can't just tell me that this one point is off the record. 

JOHN QUINN: Right? 

ANDREW FRANK: They said then I won't tell you that point.

It's a juicy one. That's right but that's exactly right. So, you know there's that on the record. Distinguished background is something that I think is, we talked, just talked a little bit about that before. But background is really important because for people in my business background is really important to help get guided journalists where you want.

You want them to look at stuff, you want them to look at a filing, you want them to look at a piece of paper, you want them to do a little digging and can say, look, I'm background, I'm gonna share with you these, these things. And so it's sort of a steer, if you will, we're steering them in a direction that's helpful.

Now, we all have our perspectives, right? I mean, if we're defending our client or we're, you know, looking ahead at our client, we obviously are wanting our clients' position to be covered, right? I think that is one of the things that makes a good communicator, whether it's a lawyer or for that matter, people in my business, is that there's an established trust factor that you're talking to a journalist and they're trusting what you're saying.

And when you have that trust factor, it's really important. I mean, it's important from a standpoint, especially if you're on the proactive side of putting something out. Whether you're the defendant or the plaintiff, majority wise, it's the plaintiff who has the upper hand to get that story out first. But it's really tough saying to a journalist, look, I can give you an exclusive, I can talk to you about certain things if you're interested in doing that.

And if you do an exclusive and the journalist agrees, there's a lot of background you can give them and a lot of guidance that you can share, and then of course you give them an on the record statement, so they have that. And I think that those gradations are tricky, I think it does take a professional view of this.

It's important and I think that there's an important reliability factor of saying, okay, you're not gonna go to bloggers versus the Wall Street Journal. It is very difficult to get a blogger who's blogging about all kinds of stuff, unless he's a friend or completely on your side to adhere to some of those rules.

JOHN QUINN: You're not gonna trust just anybody. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Have you ever found yourself surprised? I mean, you thought you were, you clearly said it was off the record, you clearly thought there was an agreement and it wasn't respected. 

ANDREW FRANK: So the answer to that is yes, but it's more about the fact that there are certain publications that have certain rules where they need to have, it can't be a spokesperson for.

They wanna have a name and often times we have agreed with the client that we're just gonna say, spokesperson, and all of a sudden you get into this one particular publication where they only want to have a name, so they need to say John Quinn, or they need to say, Andrew Frank said.

JOHN QUINN: Can you say who this publication is that you're thinking of?

ANDREW FRANK: Bloomberg. 

JOHN QUINN: Okay. Yep. 

ANDREW FRANK: Yeah. Bloomberg. Bloomberg likes to have the name as as a matter of policy, they wanna have attributed to a name. 

Yeah, and now there are different nuances to that, but majority wise, they do. That was something that went back and forth, this is several years ago now.

It's probably over a decade where all of a sudden my name showed up and I thought we had said spokesperson.

So the client said, wait a minute, why are you being quoted? Because spokesperson could mean somebody in the company or outside the company. And then all of a sudden, so now, it wasn't somebody inside the company.

So they got a little flack saying, okay, who's this? Andrew Frank’s speaking on behalf of our company. Right? But you know, we smoothed that over pretty quick. 

JOHN QUINN: Is there any relief that you can get if a reporter doesn't honor such a number, is there anything that can be done?

ANDREW FRANK: I mean, there's always the outreach to the editors, you know?

And that happens, by the way. There's a lot of times where you'll have a story that'll be pretty good, or might be for that matter, might not be great, but the headline is awful. And the headline today is what sticks on the internet. So when you do your searches, it's the headline and generally the first paragraph that helps all the Google searches go.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: So, often times that's a big thing of, what we end up doing, which is trying to correct or change or tweak a headline or the search engine optimization. Right. Exactly. But the headline is not written by the journalist. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: There's a headline writer, yeah, so you go to the journalist and you're like, well I didn't write it.

You could talk to John Smith. He does our headlines and you can ask him if he can change it. And when he does change it, they'll work with you to do that, cause they don't wanna make something wrong. But the code is already there for the internet, they're not changing the code.

Yeah. So the URL is the same. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: But they might have changed the content. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. So what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making, in your field as it relates to, you know, communications around legal things? 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, I think that some people talk too much.

I mean, I think that's just a fact, right? Yeah. People think that. I mean, it's just sometimes we're sitting around the dinner table, right?

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. It's just like, you know, I always tell witnesses, when their depositions are being taken. Just, you know, answer the question, don't say anything more.

I don't care how smart you are, if you're answering questions, you're being cross-examined for seven and a half hours by someone who's professional at asking questions and setting traps. I guarantee if you keep talking, you're gonna say something quotable, in a bad way, you're gonna say something that in reflection will look stupid.

ANDREW FRANK: Exactly and that's exactly right. So it's the same point from here. So, I've seen people just continue to talk and then all of a sudden, like, you know, 6 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes into the interview, they've said something that they shouldn't have said. So, often times what we try to do is okay, the interview is gonna be 10 minutes, or it's 15 minutes, or it's 30 minutes. You bar the time, you prepare it with the journalist. If you're doing a back and forth, we sometimes have an issue because some of our clients are international, English isn't their first language.

Right. So they want to talk in their native language because they feel more comfortable. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: But then you have the translator. You have to make sure the translator is speaking, and we've had some of those issues sometimes. 

JOHN QUINN: Oh, that can be garbage in, garbage out. 

ANDREW FRANK: Exactly. So it's really important to pay attention to every one of those words.

And also depending upon some of those, particularly when it's English being the second language and they're speaking in their native tongue, or even if they're speaking in English as a second language, we say, can we please check the quotes? Just because he or she's, it's not their language.

And we just wanna make sure that what they said conveyed it properly. And again, that's a trust factor. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. More generally. Is that a fair ask? You know, I'm being interviewed and I say, hey, okay, before you use anything, we have an agreement. You're gonna run your quotes by me, is that a fair ask?

ANDREW FRANK: I think it's a fair ask.

It is a fair ask. Not everybody's gonna agree. But it's definitely a fair ask, and I think journalists, you know, generally journalists wanna get the story right. They don't wanna, you know, they might wanna fuck over people, right? We know what you meant.You know, they might have a perspective and they come with a certain perspective, but I think, in the long run, they wanna get the story right.

So if particular people with English as a second language, if you're talking to a reporter, they often can get that if it's, you know, any of us just speaking and saying, hey, you know, I’d like to just see the quotes you'd use. That is absolutely okay for us to ask that, they may or may not honor that.

JOHN QUINN: Right. How about when the reporter says, do you mind if I tape record this? In general, is that a good thing? 

ANDREW FRANK: Yeah, it is a good thing. And for that matter, you should be tape recording it as well. Okay, you know when we do interviews, we're recording the interview because we wanna make sure that if they misquote what our client said or we said, or anybody is saying, we wanna be able to say, hey, we've got it too.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: You know, so the tape works both ways. 

JOHN QUINN: So what should you do if you're misquoted or you think the reporter just simply got something wrong, what remedies do you have? 

ANDREW FRANK: So first, as you go to the reporter, because you kind of wanna be able to have that relationship and you wanna say, hey, you know, you got this wrong.

I said X, or I told you about Y, but you kind of, you didn't get that right. The sentence isn't exactly right. And if they're not being responsive, then you do go to the editor, you generally write something together, you know, to put it down and say, you know, this is the line that I said, this is what it should be, and we appreciate a correction. Now, unfortunately, corrections are generally at the bottom, and they come a day or three later. Yeah and so the story is out, you know, out of the bag on that, but they can correct it online.

I was just gonna say, everything is online these days so you know if you can get it corrected, I think it's the most important. We spend a lot of time when we're working on a story, on a bigger story and we know that there's gonna be a lot of, you know, pickup on it a lot of times.

Picking up and calling and getting corrections, especially, if it's picked up by one of the wires and the wire gets it wrong because then, you know, 26 television stations read off the wire. Or they redid the story, so you have that, that's a real tough one. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. All right. So, I asked you about common mistakes that you've seen and you know one is talking too much. Anything else spring to mind? 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, I think again, you know, it's about the fact that, particularly in a legal case it's what we see sometimes, where the client is so dependent upon the lawyer, they're not listening to our advice.

On the comms side and on the public perception side, or for that matter, what their other stakeholders, their employees, their customers might be thinking. And I think we've seen several times where the lawyers have sort of big-footed that if you will, and that can be harmful to the client.

They're not, lawyers are doing their job. They think they're doing their job right, but the client isn't sort of paying attention to things and then it comes back to bite them. And we've seen that several times, which is why I think for us, it's really important that we work very closely with, you know, when there's legal teams, because we wanna make sure that everybody's working together on. And of course, you know, you may say that I think it should be X and I say it should be Y, we come to an agreement. But if you say it's gonna be X and you run with it, and then I said to somebody, oh, we, we shouldn't have done this. It can be a problem. 

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. How about working with the internal comms department? A lot of clients have their own communications department. Exactly. They're not used to doing what you do, they may or may not appreciate what you bring to the table. 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, I think that that's the challenge.

You know, we often say, Hey, we're not coming in to take your job, we're not coming in to sell your product. You know, so for instance, if it's an outside PR firm that does B2C or the inside comms people, you know, you guys are gonna be here when we leave. You know, just like the GC is gonna be here when you leave.

Right. And I think that's a lot of personality driven. I think our teams are, you know, we work on these projects generally, we're trying to work together, we're trying to bring a comradery, if you will, that we can all accomplish the same goal. When we leave, you can continue to sell the coffee.

Right. 

JOHN QUINN: You know how about the impact of artificial intelligence? I read about a newscaster in Korea who gets up in the morning and he has a news aggregator. You know, aggregate a 15 minute thing and then he's got a digitized version of himself, avatar and he presses a button and with a timer and the whole thing's totally artificial. He goes off and plays golf and, you know, he does his newscast. 

ANDREW FRANK: Wow. Well, first of all, I wanna see that. You can send it to me. 

In the last two years there have been so many different opportunities and challenges for both of our businesses, quite frankly, because the whole context of what's fake, what's real, what can be done in that vein, makes things harder, number one. Number two, there are certainly great ways to streamline and to get the information that you're talking about.

So, you know, you can do a draft press release all on AI. You can start feeding in various different systems, and I think that we're gonna see more of that and it should never replace the human element and it can't replace the human element in both advice and counsel and review.

You know, I think that we're seeing more and more of it. I think that people are making some mistakes because they think that, here it is, this is great, you know, oh, I just did this on AI. Well, you can tell. So I think we're getting more and more where we're looking at tools for ourselves.

We use a couple tools, but we're looking at some tools for our business, I know there's some special ones.

JOHN QUINN: You're talking about the beneficial use of how AI can help us save time, maybe get us first drafts and serve as a kind of a checklist. Something that you as a human in the loop wanna work with.

But how about the nefarious aspects of AI? Absolutely. You're like, you're dealing dueling with phantoms, the fake news that's out there. Yeah. 

ANDREW FRANK: Well, that's what I'm saying. The fake, I mean that some of this is really hard to tell. And if you're looking at social media for instance, I saw a post the other day and there were a thousand comments within 15 minutes of someone putting this up.

There's no way that those were a thousand real people, and probably the initial story that kicked it off was fake and that's very possible. And it's happened too. You're right. And I think that’s gonna, I mean, that is challenging. It's challenging us in our politics, it's challenging us in our day-to-day lives.

It's challenging us in how we communicate, I think, with just the people we care about, because you know, things are popping up on our phones all the time that are not, that are not true. Yeah, you know, I'm getting this one news thing and I think I have to just cancel it 'cause it's driving me nuts and it pops up.

I mean, I'm a Knicks fan and it pops up and it says big trade, and so you start opening it up and it says, you know, the Knicks are contemplating a big trade. And they're gonna move this one, or they could move that one, or they could, and it's totally random.

It's totally, absolutely, there's no news, there's nothing there. Exactly. Nothing happens. Now, granted, I would like a big trade that can help us get over the hump, but that's not that, you know, it's happening more and more. We're getting these, you know, bulletins that are just not correct.

JOHN QUINN: I think this phenomena has become a big problem, it's gonna become a bigger and bigger challenge for your job. 

ANDREW FRANK: Yeah, and a bigger challenge for your job. And I mean, for clients who need people like us to sift through the crap, I think it is a big problem. Yeah. It is a big problem. 

JOHN QUINN: Andrew, thanks very much.

Interesting conversation. Talking with Andrew Frank of Karv Communications, Strategic Communications firm. This is John Quinn. This has been Law, disrupted.

Thank you for listening to Law, disrupted with me, John Quinn. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your chosen podcast app to stay up to date with the latest episodes. You can sign up for email alerts at our website, Law-disrupted fm or follow me on X at JB Q Law or at Quinn Emanuel.

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