Firms come to me wanting a new story: the survivor’s account, the pattern-of-practice case, the verdict framing. Before any of that goes out, I check what a reporter or opposing counsel finds when they search the client’s name. If the old record is messier than the new story, the new story doesn’t hold.
The purpose is accuracy. Old posts, outdated bios, a stale quote from a different case, a social account that hasn’t been touched since before the matter started. None of it is evidence of wrongdoing, but all of it is a gap the defense will point to first: “look what else is out there.” A narrative launched on top of an unexamined public footprint is a narrative built on a foundation nobody checked.
It’s an audit, not a scrub: what’s public about the client and the case right now, what’s accurate, what’s outdated, and what a defense researcher would flag in the first hour of looking. Corrections go through the same channel as everything else here: counsel’s sign-off, nothing deleted while a case is anticipated or pending, nothing added that was not already true.
Only once that record is accurate and current does the new narrative go out. Reporters and researchers check the same public sources the defense does. If the story and the record agree, the story holds. If they don’t, the record decides it.
Before filing, I have the same conversation with the named plaintiff. A defense researcher will read every public post going back years, looking for anything that contradicts the injury, the timeline or the character the case depends on. I walk the client through privacy settings and what is publicly visible. Whether anything relevant to discovery can be changed is a question for counsel, not for me. Anything posted publicly during litigation should be assumed to be read by the other side first.
This is why record cleanup sits first in the system, not as an afterthought once coverage starts. A verdict-day story built on a clean, current record survives scrutiny. The same story built on top of an unexamined footprint gives the defense its easiest opening, not on the facts of the case, but on everything around it.