Three retained disciplines, applied across four regulated environments. The pages that follow describe the operating scope of the firm — not a catalogue of services.
Each practice area is staffed separately, contracted separately, and priced separately. A client may retain one, two, or all three depending on the maturity of its crisis posture.
Senior partners embedded alongside leadership during the 72 hours that decide whether a story becomes a footnote or a legacy.
An engagement contains: a 24/7/365 hotline with a nine-minute partner-response SLA; an on-call war-room bench of 120 professionals; daily partner-led counsel; structured internal and external messaging architecture; legal-coordination support; and post-event reputation forensics. Retainer terms begin at twelve months and renew automatically unless terminated on sixty days' notice.
A diagnostic and remediation engagement that builds organisational muscle so the next event does not catch leadership flat-footed.
An engagement contains: a Tier-1 risk audit against the firm's Hartwell Protocol; a vulnerability map across communications, legal, regulatory, and operational exposure; tabletop simulations calibrated to the client's specific threat profile; and a written readiness dossier delivered to the board. Of our retained clients, ninety-two per cent have not experienced a Tier-1 reputational escalation in the twenty-four months following completion.
A certification curriculum for executives and crisis response teams, taught by sitting partners rather than contracted facilitators.
The program contains: a four-tier curriculum (Foundations, Response, Counsel, Board); cohort sizes capped at fourteen executives; case material drawn from redacted engagement files; and a written examination administered at the end of each tier. Twenty-two thousand four hundred executives have been certified since the program's founding in 2012. The Hartwell Protocol itself is now the operating manual of fourteen of the world's top twenty-five public relations firms.
Operational facts, not marketing adjectives. The items below are written into every retainer letter the firm issues.
Every active engagement is led by a sitting senior partner. Average partner tenure at the firm is 11.4 years — against an industry average of 2.3 — because the firm does not promote out of the partner rank. Junior staffing on live matters is, by policy, zero.
The firm operates the only crisis hotline in the advisory sector staffed by a sitting partner at every hour of every day. A senior partner is on a confidential call within nine minutes of hotline activation. The line is direct; it does not route through a switchboard, an answering service, or a chatbot.
Engagements are contracted under mutual non-disclosure with the firm listed only as "strategic advisory" on client disclosures. Partner laptops are siloed per engagement. The firm declines any matter where the identity of the client would be reasonably inferable from public information.
An engagement is scoped first by the threat surface — regulated exposure, jurisdictional exposure, and operational exposure — and second by the operational tempo required to neutralise it. Average issue resolution against the industry norm is eleven days, against forty-seven.
The firm's clearance profile is sectoral rather than geographic. The verticals below are the regulated environments in which the firm maintains standing counsel relationships and current jurisdictional expertise.
Pharmaceuticals, medical devices, energy, and Big Tech. These are the environments where a single disclosure failure cascades into regulatory inquiry, securities exposure, and product-class litigation simultaneously. The firm maintains current clearance in thirty-eight countries across these sectors and staffs engagements with partners who have served in-house at the relevant regulator or at peer firms operating under the same supervisory regime. Engagements are typically structured around a thirty-day readiness audit, a standing retainer, and a contingent rapid-response team held on call.
Twelve sovereign entities and six multilateral institutions currently retain the firm on a standing basis. Sovereign engagements operate under a distinct protocol that isolates the firm's partner group from any political or campaigning activity, and requires disclosure approval at both ends of the relationship before any communication is issued. The firm does not accept mandates from sitting administrations, campaigns, or party-political organisations.
Listed corporations, pre-IPO issuers, and financial sponsors facing disclosure-driven events. The firm operates under the Hartwell Protocol's market-sensitive overlay, which sequences partner counsel against disclosure windows, blackout periods, and the materiality threshold used by the firm's outside counsel. Partners on capital-markets engagements hold the appropriate regulatory clearances for the jurisdictions in which the issuer is listed or quoted.
Universities, hospital systems, faith-based institutions, and other organisations whose reputational standing is functionally indistinguishable from their operating licence. Institutional engagements are typically initiated at the board level rather than at the communications office, and are structured for the long horizon of stakeholder trust rather than the news cycle. Average partner tenure at the firm — 11.4 years — is the operational reason institutional clients renew at a 96% rate, year over year.
The first seventy-two hours are not about getting the message right. They are about a small group of people in a room making disciplined decisions under conditions of incomplete information. Our role is to be in that room — beside the general counsel, beside the chief executive, beside the chair — and to keep the discipline from slipping.
The briefing is conducted under mutual non-disclosure. No prospectus, no slide deck, no obligation. The partner will arrive having read the file you have chosen to share.
Briefings are scheduled within seventy-two hours of request. The firm's intake desk operates from Washington, London, and Singapore.
