Sometimes a client comes to a case already discredited — a defendant's early statement painted them as unreliable, exaggerating, or worse, and that framing reached the public before any advocate did. Rehabilitating that record is a different job than launching a new narrative from a clean slate.
You're not introducing a story into an empty space; you're competing with a story that already landed and that some readers have already decided to believe, per the same confirmation-bias mechanics that make a first account so durable. Correcting it requires more than better facts — it requires understanding specifically what the defendant's framing claimed, and answering that claim directly rather than just telling the client's story in isolation.
Consistency and time, paired with an account that's independently verifiable — medical records, corroborating witnesses, documentation the defendant's framing didn't account for. A single rebuttal rarely undoes a discrediting narrative. Sustained, accurate, consistent coverage that keeps answering the same original claim, every time it resurfaces, is what actually shifts a reader's settled opinion. This is slow work. It is also some of the most necessary work in this practice.