DLPR Named Among Top Firms Specializing in Crisis Communications

Excerpted from “18 Top Public-Relations Experts CEOs Scramble to Hire in a Crisis” by Michael Kaminer.

Brands once sought crisis PR for one-off incidents like an airplane crash, a product recall, or a scandal. Now, in a deeply polarized world grappling with labor unrest, online misinformation, and cultural conflicts, crisis communications have become an everyday need.

Crisis PR has also grown to encompass risk assessment and mitigation, and clients are relying more on PR pros to advise on potential outcomes of regular events like product launches, marketing campaigns, and even executive hires.

Insider identified 18 top crisis-PR pros across the US, based on their clients, influence, and impact. To choose the people on this list, we spoke with journalists, clients, and in-house PR staff who often work with crisis firms.

Dukas Linden Public Relations

Crisis is a key component of comms work for this 20-year-old financial public-relations firm, Richard Dukas told Insider. Dukas Linden has advised clients through regulatory-enforcement actions, litigation, activist-shareholder situations, bankruptcies and restructurings, DEI issues, and other challenges.

While nondisclosure agreements prohibit Dukas from naming crisis clients, he told Insider his firm has handled responses to a cybersecurity breach for a large credit union, a “major personal reputational issue” for a global asset manager, and allegations of racial discrimination against customers by a community bank.

The New York firm’s clients have included BlueMountain Capital, at the time a $20 billion AUM asset manager, since sold to Assured Guaranty; Muddy Waters Research and founder Carson Bloch, a headline-making activist investor; and BlockFi, one of the largest crypto platforms before FTX’s collapse, and now in bankruptcy.