In July 1994, I left behind my previous careers in print journalism (Gannett Newspapers), politics (Hamilton Fish III, D-New York), and government (the New York state Senate) to take my first job in legal public relations. My Big Boss: the extremely and deservedly famous PR icon, Howard J. Rubenstein (1932-2020). Howard represented The New York Yankees, Rupert Murdoch, then-developer Donald Trump, many politicians, and most of New York’s premier hospitals and universities. And … quite a few BigLaw firms, before anyone called them that. My first clients: two firms that no longer exist—Bower & Gardner (a health care boutique, now gone) and Rosenman Colin (now the New York office of Chicago’s Katten). Rubenstein gave me other things to do, too, but I gravitated to lawyers, because a) they were smart; b) many of them were sarcastic, like me; and c) their firms, to my delight, seemed to make real news every single day. I never would have guessed that I would spend the rest of my professional life doing oublic relations for the august members of the bar, but I’ve enjoyed almost every second of it.

In the intervening years, I’ve worked in-house, as well as in the outhouse (seemingly), in PR firms and in my solo practice. I worked for more than 15 years in Philadelphia, with stints in New York, New Jersey, and of late, rural Georgia. I’ve worked for law firms ranging from corporate titans to aggressive plaintiffs’ class action lawyers. Let’s see if I can boil down my experiences to 11 useful or at least mildly interesting events and thoughts for the P.R. audience, some of them so obvious they are often ignored. We’ll do this in two parts, if you’ll indulge the loquaciousness.