Newsjacking, also known as rapid response PR, means giving journalists an expert reaction to a story that’s already making headlines, fast enough to be useful before the moment passes. It works because journalists writing under pressure need someone credible to comment, and there’s rarely time to go looking.
If you’re a law firm, accountancy practice or consultancy wondering whether newsjacking still earns its place in your PR strategy, here’s my answer: it matters more now than at any point in the last twenty years. Real, credible, human expertise has never been in shorter supply, or higher demand.
I’ll be honest with you first, though. Newsjacking isn’t for every firm. If you don’t have a spokesperson, or the one you’ve got refuses to play ball, this tactic won’t work for you. Keep reading anyway, because the reasoning behind it matters even if your approach needs to look different.
TL;DR
- Editors need fast, credible, human comment more than ever, and professional services firms are sitting on exactly that.
- The real challenge isn’t finding a story to comment on. It’s turning busy fee earners into confident PR spokespeople.
- Newsjacking works best when it’s matched to where your firm wants to be seen and where journalist demand actually sits. It’s one tool, not the only one.
The media landscape rewards real experts now
Newsrooms have shrunk. There are fewer full-time journalists and fewer outlets than there were five years ago, and the ones still standing are stretched thin. At the same time, AI-generated content has flooded search, and we’ve watched national titles get burned quoting “experts” who didn’t check out.
Journalists have become more cautious as a result, not less hungry for comment. What they want is a real person who understands the subject, can be reached fast, and can add something new to the story instead of repeating what’s already been said. That’s a gap professional services firms are unusually well placed to fill.
You’re sitting on a PR gold mine (if you can unlock it)
Every law firm, accountancy practice and consultancy I’ve worked with has the same untapped asset: its people. Partners, associates and fee earners who deal with the exact issues making headlines, from employment tribunals to business failures to regulatory change, as part of their day job.
A press release announcing your latest partner hire is great. It proves you’re commercially active. It does very little for your AI visibility, your search authority, or your reputation as the expert your audience turns to first. Reactive commentary builds all three, and it lands you coverage on some of the highest domain authority websites in existence, which matters just as much for SEO and GEO as it does for broader brand awareness and reputation.
The catch: it only works if someone at your firm is genuinely willing to put their name to an opinion, at short notice, on someone else’s deadline.
The challenge: turning fee earners into PR stars
Here’s the question clients ask us more than any other. How do you get busy partners to actually do this?
That’s the honest challenge of newsjacking for professional services firms. Your fee earners aren’t necessarily motivated by getting into The Times. They’re motivated by winning clients. Media commentary isn’t in their job description, and their diaries are already full before you ask them to add anything.
What changes their minds is seeing it work. The moment one partner gets quoted in a national title and a client mentions it, or a colleague sends a congratulatory message, something clicks. Other partners want a slice of the PR pie. Other departments start asking to get involved. Momentum builds fast once the first result lands.
Our job covers two things: training the partners who are keen and ready, and coaxing the ones who hesitate but should be involved, because their expertise is exactly what the market and the media are looking for. That’s a genuinely different skill from running a traditional press office, and it’s where a lot of in-house teams get stuck.
In practice, that starts with an interview, not a media brief. We ask each fee earner what they want to talk about, what they’d rather steer clear of, and where their real expertise sits. From there, we start sending them topical stories to react to and help shape their initial thoughts into comment a journalist can actually use.
Once coverage lands, we don’t stop there. We help them make the most of it: sharing it properly on LinkedIn, tagging the right people, and framing it so clients and colleagues see it as more than a passing mention.
If a story escalates into a journalist wanting to speak to them directly, we prepare them properly: formal half-day media training to get them interview-ready, plus informal practice calls by phone in the run-up to bigger interviews, so nerves never get in the way of a good story.
Matching your firm’s ambition to what journalists actually want
Not every area of expertise newsjacks equally well, and that’s fine. It just means being strategic about where you focus.
Take employment law and dispute resolution as an example. Sadly, there’s always a story: a tribunal ruling, a company heading into administration or liquidation, a business under threat of either. Those beats create a near-constant stream of opportunities for experts with something sharp to say.
We look at two things side by side: where the firm wants to be positioned as experts, both by practice area and by sector, and where the real journalist demand sits. Sometimes those two things line up perfectly. Sometimes they don’t, and that tells us something useful too. Where an area of expertise doesn’t lend itself to reactive commentary, we switch tactics: proactively pitched opinion pieces, feature contributions, or broadcast interviews built around a topical hook.
Newsjacking isn’t the be-all and end-all. It’s one of the most effective ways to land top-tier coverage in national newspaper websites, trade titles, and sometimes regional press too. For professional services firms specifically, it tends to outperform almost everything else we do.
The proof
We’ve run reactive commentary programmes for professional services clients for more than two decades, and the results speak for themselves.
For Mayo Wynne Baxter, reactive comment has driven the majority of their coverage, including recent national hits in The Guardian, BBC News Online, The Sun, the Express and the Daily Mirror. Partner Nick Stockley said:
“This increase in profile has directly resulted in an increase in client instructions. This coverage has also enhanced my reputation both within my firm and with both existing and potential clients. The coverage has helped encourage other team members to use the Midnight team, which has resulted in further success for these colleagues.”
Nick Stockley, Partner, Mayo Wynne Baxter
For Morr & Co, reactive commentary has landed coverage in titles such as The Times, The Sunday Times, the Financial Times and City AM. As Business Development & Marketing Director Mike Jackson told us:
“Within the first month they secured coverage in publications that had previously been out of reach for our in-house team, including a national piece in The Times… Their work doesn’t just help build our reputation; it also supports our SEO and GEO objectives by helping drive high-quality traffic to our website.”
Mike Jackson, Business Development & Marketing Director, Morr & Co LLP
How we make it work, day to day
None of this happens by chance. Behind every well-timed comment sits a spokesperson we’ve interviewed to understand what they can speak to and what they actually care about, a daily media monitoring process built to spot the right stories the moment they break, and a same-afternoon turnaround from story to pitch.
We ask spokespeople for pithy, opinionated comment, not a recap of what’s already been reported, and every word gets signed off by them before it reaches a journalist. Speed matters, but never at the cost of judgement or accuracy.
And finally…
Newsjacking works for professional services firms because it turns existing expertise into visible, credible proof of it, but only if you’re willing to put real people forward, train them properly, and match their expertise to where media appetite actually sits. Done well, it doesn’t just win coverage. It wins clients.
If you’re sitting on expertise that isn’t yet working hard enough for your firm’s reputation, get in touch: this is exactly the kind of PR gold mine we love to dig into. And if your spokespeople need a confidence boost before they start fielding journalist calls, our media training programme is built for exactly that.
Read on
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