The Hartwell Protocol
The operating manual we built when nothing on the shelf was good enough.
A proprietary doctrine for the seventy-two hours that decide whether a story becomes a footnote or a legacy — written by our founding partners, refined across more than a thousand engagements, and now adopted as the working manual of crisis firms on four continents.
The Doctrine
Seven chapters. One operating system for the first seventy-two hours.
The Protocol is not a checklist of talking points. It is a complete doctrine — from the first hotline call to the after-action review — designed to be run by a sitting partner, not by a junior associate with a template.
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01
Convene the Cell
Within nine minutes of hotline activation, a senior partner is on a confidential call with the principal. Chapter One codifies who is in the room, who is on the line, who is silent, and who is forbidden from speaking on behalf of the company until the cell has spoken.
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02
Map the Terrain
The first four hours are for listening, not broadcasting. We assemble the verified facts, isolate the unknowns, and chart the actors — regulators, counterparties, journalists, employees, plaintiffs — who will shape the next seventy-two hours of coverage.
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03
Seize the Narrative Spine
Every crisis has a story the public is about to be told. Chapter Three dictates how we write the alternative version first, with documentary evidence, before the adversary's version calcifies. The spine is set in the first twenty-four hours — or not at all.
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04
Stagger the Disclosure
Disclosure is a controlled release, not a press release. We sequence statements to employees, regulators, counterparties, customers, and the press in the order that protects the principal — and we rehearse every line with the principal before it leaves the building.
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05
Hold the Line
Days two through seven are the siege. The Protocol prescribes the daily partner standup, the press triage rotation, the regulator log, the litigation hold, and the discipline of silence on speculation — the hours where most firms lose the room.
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06
Resolve and Document
Chapter Six defines what counts as resolution — not the news cycle, but the binding written record: the settlement, the regulator's no-action letter, the withdrawn lawsuit, the corrected front page. Until the record is closed, the engagement is open.
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07
After-Action and Hardening
The Hartwell close is a written document — what happened, what we got right, what we missed, and the three changes to governance, training, and disclosure that ensure the next event does not catch the principal flat-footed. It is signed by the partner and the principal.
Origin and Refinement
Written in 2009, rewritten every year since.
The Hartwell Protocol was drafted in the autumn of 2009 by the firm's three founding partners — all former White House Directors of Communications — and a fourth founder who had served as general counsel to a Fortune 50 industrial. None of them could point to a manual on the shelf that would have survived the first six hours of the events they had just left behind. They wrote one.
The first edition was forty-two pages. It was rewritten in 2011 after the firm's first sovereign engagement, again in 2014 when the London office opened and a European regulatory chapter was added, and again in 2019 with the Singapore office's chapter on cross-jurisdictional disclosure. The current edition runs to three hundred and twelve pages across seven chapters and forty-one annexes.
Across 1,340-plus engagements since founding, the Protocol has been stress-tested against product recalls, regulatory actions, executive departures, data breaches, activist campaigns, securities litigation, and one sovereign default. The annual revision is the firm's single largest internal commitment — six weeks of partner-only retreat, every January — and is the reason no engagement runs on yesterday's doctrine.
— Hartwell Editorial Board, January 2024 edition
Adoption
Adopted, taught, and stress-tested at scale.
The Hartwell Protocol is the operating manual of the firm's own engagements — and, increasingly, of firms that have studied us.
of the world's top twenty-five public relations firms now run the Hartwell Protocol as their internal crisis operating manual.
executives certified through the Hartwell Crisis Readiness Program since 2012, across thirty-eight countries.
is the firm's published response-time SLA — a senior partner on a confidential call within nine minutes of hotline activation, twenty-four hours a day.
average time from engagement to resolution or neutralization of a Tier-1 issue — against an industry norm measured in months.
Featured analysis in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and the Financial Times.
Recipient of the 2023 PRWeek Crisis Agency of the Year and the 2022 Holmes Report Global SABRE Award for Crisis Management.
The Executive Syllabus
What the syllabus contains.
The Executive Syllabus is a seventy-eight-page companion to the full Hartwell Protocol — written for the principal who has not yet retained the firm and wants to understand the doctrine before the next event arrives.
- A condensed reading of all seven chapters, in plain English, with the worked reasoning behind each doctrine.
- The Hartwell Readiness Audit — a self-administered, sixty-question diagnostic your general counsel can run in a single afternoon.
- The First-Ninety-Minutes Checklist — the single sheet our partners keep in their briefcases, formatted for a boardroom wall.
- The Disclosure Sequencing Matrix — how to order statements to employees, regulators, counterparties, customers, and press when you have hours, not days.
- A short reference of red-flag phrases, courtesy obligations, and the four sentences a principal must never sign without counsel review.
- A glossary of the terms your communications team will use in the first call — so the principal is not learning vocabulary during the crisis.
What it is not.
The Executive Syllabus is not a substitute for retention.
It is an orientation, not an operating capability. The full Hartwell Protocol — three hundred and twelve pages, with the partner-only annexes — remains the property of retained clients.
It is not a marketing brochure. There are no case studies, no named incidents, no counterparties. The doctrinal reasoning stands on its own evidence; the syllabus never trades on the misfortune of others.
It is not a contract for service. The syllabus is delivered under a mutual non-disclosure agreement, free of charge, within one business day of a written request from a verified principal or general counsel.
Request the Syllabus
Request the Executive Syllabus.
Delivered under NDA, within one business day.
Crisis Hotline · Senior Partner, Twenty-Four Hours
+1 (202) 555-0184A senior partner is on a confidential call within nine minutes of hotline activation, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.