A single anonymous post can spread across social platforms with incredible speed. An AI-generated image, video or article can be fabricated and circulated regardless of its authenticity. A viral campaign consisting of websites, bots and purported news amplification builds a narrative to drive malicious goals.

Clients, and law firms themselves, increasingly face reputational threats. Regardless of digital format, by the time an individual or company and its legal counsel identify the threat, the content is often already influencing public opinion. Controversial content that spreads across the internet does more than affect public opinion. It can influence potential jury pools and judges, shape media coverage and impact how a matter is viewed by shareholders, regulators, government officials, business partners and other stakeholders.

Legal Remedies and Communications Strategies Must Work Together to Solve a Digital Crisis

Legal and communications teams exist in a new digital risk reality. Conventional crisis playbooks such as a press statement, a retraction demand or a cease-and-desist letter are often inadequate to contain reputational fallout. Companies require a more integrated, faster-moving and longer-lasting strategy that brings traditional legal and communications practices and digital-age functions together immediately.

Legal strategy and communications strategy cannot operate in isolation when deceptive or potentially harmful content spreads online.

Effective response means close coordination between legal counsel and communications counsel, who should:

• Confirm that the entire team understands that the strategic goal is protecting organizational and individual reputation and brand throughout the legal process, alongside securing the legal outcome itself.
• Evaluate which legal solutions are available before deployment and the possible reputational impacts of each.
• Establish a thorough and proactive timeline to command and control the narrative.
• Act immediately but avoid actions that inadvertently strengthen the very content they are trying to neutralize.
• Meticulously monitor and measure as developments occur.
• Pivot the coordinated response between legal and communications functions in real time as needed.

A formal legal notice or a defamation claim may be truthful and accurate in nature, but without a coordinated communications response, it can fail to stop the reputational damage, or worse, become the story itself. A poorly timed public statement or an aggressive takedown demand can draw far more attention to damaging content than it would have received on its own, especially when the legal action isn’t paired with a communications strategy. This trend, often called the Streisand effect, is one of the most common ways in which well-intentioned legal action backfires. The term originates from a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer to remove an aerial photo of her Malibu home from a public database, only to see the image go viral and reach far more people than it ever would have otherwise. Since then, the phrase has come to describe any situation where an attempt to suppress or hide information inadvertently draws greater public attention to it.

‘Get It Down!’ An Evaluation of Legal Options Available to Protect and Manage a Client’s Digital Reputation

The natural first reaction to any digital crisis is to ask how to get it down. This is where the legal and communications collaboration is essential. Understanding the legal standards, limitations of legal liability and platform standards enables the legal and communications teams to build an effective multipronged strategy.

Section 230 and the Limits of Platform Liability

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally protects online platforms from liability for content posted by third parties, so claims against a platform hosting defamatory content rarely succeed on this basis. Pursuing the individual or entity that created or posted the content remains the more fruitful course of action. Understanding the difference matters for anyone evaluating strategy, since misdirected efforts aimed at platforms rather than content creators can waste valuable time and resources while the damaging material stays alive and continues to spread.

Often Copyright or Trademark Law Outperforms Defamation Claims

Winning a defamation claim against the individual or entity that created or posted the content isn’t easy. Plaintiffs need to prove the statement was false, demonstrate actual malice for public figures, and back up their damages with hard numbers. Clearing those hurdles takes time, which can slow down any real relief. Legal teams facing digital reputation threats benefit from expanding their analysis beyond defamation and considering the full range of legal tools that might apply to the specific content at issue.

Copyright and trademark claims sometimes provide faster takedown mechanisms or clearer legal footing, particularly when the disputed content also involves unauthorized use of a logo or protected image.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides the most straightforward and likely path to getting copyrighted material taken down. “In some instances, I’ve even had cases where plaintiffs purchase the rights to a photograph in order to leverage having a post removed from a platform,” said Recht Kornfeld partner Chris Beall.

Identifying Anonymous Online Speakers

Much harmful or defamatory digital content originates from anonymous accounts, raising complex legal, procedural and reputation questions. Identifying an anonymous poster involves navigating the legal standards courts use, the procedural steps required to seek discovery from platforms and the public-perception considerations that come with following this route, which may become public. In some cases, litigation can generate more attention and scrutiny than the original digital issue itself.

Companies considering this path need to weigh the likelihood that they can identify an anonymous speaker and whether doing so serves their broader strategic and reputational goals.

AI-Generated Content: A New and Changing Risk Category

AI-generated content is creating entirely new categories of legal and reputational risk. Deepfakes and AI-fabricated digital content, including social media posts and entire websites, can be produced and distributed at a volume and speed that traditional defamation laws were not designed to address.

This raises timely questions for legal and communications professionals. How do you prove or challenge authorship or origin of AI-generated defamatory content? How do existing legal measures apply when the source is a generative model rather than an identifiable individual? And, potentially most importantly, how quickly can a coordinated response be mounted before AI-generated falsehoods are indexed, shared and spread across the internet?

Organizations need to treat AI-generated misinformation as a distinct risk category, one that requires monitoring tools, well-developed crisis plans and legal strategies tailored to how this content spreads and persists online.

Search Results: The New Battleground for Digital Reputation

Reputation management and recovery must also consider how content is indexed, surfaced and potentially resurfaced by search engines, algorithms and increasingly by AI-driven search engines. Response plans must include search visibility since AEO and GEO considerations are now core to digital reputation management.

Answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization are becoming essential components of protecting an organization’s standing online. Crisis response strategies now need a search-oriented dimension alongside legal and traditional media relations efforts, as AI-driven results can continue to surface or even amplify harmful content long after the original source has been addressed.

Building a Resilient Response Framework for Your Legal Team

Other legal remedies are available beyond what is covered here. From privacy claims to intentional infliction of emotional distress claims, lawyers are making novel arguments from new and old legal theories. The law in this area continues to evolve, and public sentiment increasingly favors stronger protections for individuals and businesses facing online attacks, a shift that can determine how judges, regulators and the public respond to a given case even before any ruling is issued.

The businesses and their legal teams that navigate online crises most effectively combine legal strategy and communications strategy into a single coordinated response, rather than treating them as separate decisions. Before a crisis hits, this means establishing crisis plans with clearly outlined working teams in advance; jointly delineating clear protocols for how legal teams and communications teams will collaborate; identifying which types of content should lead to legal action versus a communications-only response; and building relationships with digital monitoring resources that can flag threats before they gain traction.

The organizations best positioned to protect their reputation plan for this reality in advance, rather than improvising a response after damaging content has already begun to spread.

Andrea Christman, a managing director at Poston Communications, for more than 25 years has counseled law firm and corporate leaders through high-risk, high-visibility matters, helping organizations align communications with legal strategy, protect institutional credibility and communicate with clarity under pressure.

Beth Huffman, a managing director at Poston Communications, has more than 40 years of experience in communications, media and marketing. She has spent the last two decades helping major law firms, legal organizations and their global clients create strategic narratives that elevate their reputations and work.

Dave Poston is the CEO and general counsel of Poston Communications. A licensed attorney, he has worked as a legal business development, marketing and communications professional for the last 30 years.

Reprinted with permission from the September 4, 2026 edition of The Legal Intelligencer © 2026 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877-257-3382 or reprints@alm.com.