Introducing the Global Crisis Management Handbook

We are glad to share with you the first edition of the Global Crisis Management Handbook, a publication founded by Cleary Gottlieb lawyers and designed to serve as your go-to reference for many of the legal and practical implications that frequently arise in cross-border investigations or other large-scale corporate events.

Corporations operating in an increasingly globalized, regulated, and litigious environment must be cognizant that unexpected and potentially destabilizing events are, more than ever, likely to play out in the public eye and elicit responses from regulators, criminal enforcement authorities, and private claimants across multiple jurisdictions. Businesses operating across jurisdictions must therefore be prepared to respond in a coordinated way to requests from multiple government agencies located throughout the geographic areas their businesses touch. Given the increased speed and reach of the news cycle, corporations must be prepared to provide such a coordinated response even while the company itself is learning about the event and as it plays out in public.

This handbook will help you spot issues and avoid common mistakes, particularly at the outset of a crisis or investigation, and is divided into several chapters, each focused on an area of concern common to cross-border investigations, including:

• Considerations relevant to quickly understanding the facts of a matter and managing public perception.
• Appropriately and efficiently working to address concerns of governmental authorities.
• Legal issues that typically arise during governmental investigations, particularly those presented by differing legal regimes.
• The possible collateral consequences associated with large-scale governmental investigations.

The Global Crisis Management Handbook also contains helpful checklists keyed to particular phases of crisis management and incident response. They are cross-referenced and designed to help you quickly think through and identify information that may be necessary for the task at hand.

Please see this edition’s full table of contents below, and click here to download a PDF version of the handbook.

We hope that this handbook is able to provide some useful insights into issues common to such inquiries as along with practical steps for thinking about how to address them. We encourage you to email Alexander Janghorbani (ajanghorbani@cgsh.com), Alanna Newman (anewmann@cgsh.com), Nowell Bamberger (nbamberger@cgsh.com), or Jennifer Kennedy Park (jkpark@cgsh.com) with comments, questions, and any suggestions for subsequent editions.