One In-House Counsel’s Crisis Management Advice: ‘Run Into the Flames’ (Corporate Counsel)
Corporate Counsel, December 1, 2017
One In-House Counsel’s Crisis Management Advice: ‘Run Into the Flames’
“On the morning of Jan. 9, 2013, a SeaStreak commuter ferry carrying more than 300 passengers crashed into a pier near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. More than a hundred people were injured, and in the days and weeks that followed, 46 passengers would sue the ferry owner in federal court. When the high-speed commuter ferry collided with Pier 11 in the East River, Thomas Wynne, vice president and general counsel of SeaStreak, was in London in talks to renew the company’s marine insurance. At the Corporate Counsel Symposium, an event put on Friday by the New York City Bar Association, Wynne recounted how he navigated the crisis, both from a public opinion perspective and a legal one. ‘When [a crisis] actually happens, I think it’s important that you run into the flames,’ Wynne said on the panel Friday. ‘The tendency would be to hire it out. But you know your people, you know your operations better than anybody else.'”
