Los Angeles crisis and issues management
LUCID Strategies (DBA LUCID Public Relations) is a Los Angeles crisis and issues management firm. We are called when a reputation, a case, or a life is being decided in public, and the wrong story is winning.
Most of our work never runs in a trade publication. A company facing a lawsuit that is about to become a headline. An executive named in a story that has the facts wrong. A board that has found a problem before the public has, and has hours to decide what it will confirm and what it will not. In each of those moments the legal position and the public story are run by different people, on different clocks, and the gap between them is where the damage happens. Our job is to close that gap.
The Los Angeles media market decides more than it should
A crisis in Los Angeles is not covered the way a crisis in most cities is. This is where the national entertainment press, the industry trades, the local network affiliates, and the wire desks all sit in one market, and a story that starts in one crosses into the others fast. A regulatory inquiry downtown. A boardroom dispute in Century City. An executive departure at a Santa Monica tech firm. A filing in Los Angeles Superior Court. A viral clip. Any of them can move from a single reporter to a national desk in an afternoon. The ecosystem is built to pull a private corporate problem into public view.
That speed is why the first hours matter here. A company that waits for a story to settle before it decides what to say usually finds the story has settled without it. The reporters who cover these cases work to deadline, and silence reads as a concession. The work is to be ready before the call comes: to know who speaks for the organization, what is confirmed and safe to say, and what should not be said yet.
The kinds of LA crises we handle
The matters that reach us in Los Angeles tend to fall into a few shapes:
- A lawsuit filed against a company or an executive that is written to be quoted, handed to a sympathetic reporter, and read as fact before anyone tests it.
- A regulatory inquiry or investigation that leaks before the organization is ready to answer for it.
- An executive-conduct allegation that arrives in the press before it arrives through any formal channel.
- A public dispute where the legal team wants to say nothing and leadership wants to answer, and the contradiction becomes the story.
The discipline is the same in each: contest the frame, not the merits; say only what the record can carry; keep the public message and the legal position in the same world, so the company is never caught telling two audiences two versions of the same case.
Both instincts that pull at a company in these moments are right about their own audience and wrong about the other's. "No comment" is legally safe and reads, in public, as a concession; it leaves a vacuum the other side will fill with its own facts. A sweeping public denial made before the facts are in is a gift to opposing counsel, who needs only one ambiguous email to prove a contradiction months later. The useful posture is the narrow, true statement the organization can stand behind for the length of the scrutiny.
We work with clients across the greater Los Angeles area, including Santa Monica and the Westside, and with counsel wherever the matter is being litigated.
The work is tested on the record
The value of a crisis firm is not in what it promises. It is in what it has done, under deadline, on the record. Jonathan Franks and LUCID's work have been profiled by ABC News Nightline, and the firm's public-record work has also been covered by the Associated Press.
Jonathan Franks is the firm's president and co-founder. He works the cases himself; clients who retain LUCID are not handed to a bench of juniors.
For more on how we work and what we have handled, see our services and our results.
What to do when the story is already moving
If a matter involving your organization is about to become public in Los Angeles, or already has, the useful first step is not a statement. It is a conversation about what is confirmed, what is at stake, and what the company can say that is both true and durable.
Speak with us confidentially. LUCID is reachable after hours.
Phone: 310-859-4600