Two years after Nigel Farage revealed that Coutts had closed his accounts, sparking a firestorm over debanking, political bias, and corporate transparency, NatWest Group's settlement with the Reform UK leader last month (26 March) marks somewhat of an endpoint to the saga.

Yet, the reputational aftershocks continue to reverberate. In addition to substantial financial costs to NatWest, the episode demonstrated how seemingly private matters can now become a national conversation, often without warning. In this case, a personal banking issue became a matter of free speech, corporate power, and social exclusion.

Reputation shift

This case illustrates a fundamental shift in how reputational crises now unfold. Today, businesses increasingly negotiate complex social and political minefields. With social media algorithms rewarding outrage, and partisan media outlets thriving on framing business stories through ideological lenses, a routine commercial decision can rapidly escalate into a major public debate, and a proxy battle in the culture wars.

In this environment, the old crisis comms playbook — where legal teams focused solely on liability, and corporate communications managed messaging in separate silos — has grown obsolete. PwC’s recent Global Crisis and Resilience Survey highlighted that it’s no longer sufficient for organisations to be in silos in how they address today’s complex and interconnected risks.

Two additional recent major crises stand as further proof of this.

BrewDog's 2021 workplace culture crisis went from bad to worse when its initial legal threats against whistleblowing former employees fuelled public backlash. Recovery began only after the company adopted an integrated approach, confidentially settling employment tribunals while publicly launching its 'Blueprint' employee benefits programme and independent HR audits. This dual strategy stabilised the brand, though some scepticism remains.

With the Post Office Horizon scandal, meanwhile, years of aggressive legal action against sub-postmasters backfired spectacularly when ITV's dramatisation forced public reckoning. By then, delayed compensation schemes and accountability measures couldn't prevent severe reputational and financial damage.

A new crisis normal

These cases demonstrate why legal and PR strategies must work coherently from the earliest warning signs.

Recent crises highlight a number of critical moments where this legal-PR interplay can prove decisive:

• Investigative journalism. The moment a company receives notice of an impending exposé marks the beginning of a critical countdown. Legal teams must assess risks like defamation or privacy breaches in draft responses, while corporate communications professionals craft narratives that satisfy media scrutiny without fuelling critics.

• Sting operations. When organisations face secret filming and similar stings, the dial shifts again. Legal advisors must scrutinise the methodology for potential breaches of the Editors’ Code or data protection laws, while communications experts prepare spokespeople for the inevitable media storm. The combination of legal objections to unfair editing and PR-driven context-setting often determines whether an organisation controls the narrative or becomes its victim.

• Pre-publication injunctions. Legal tools like pre-publication injunctions or privacy claims remain potent, but double-edged swords. A balanced approach is required, beginning with editorial negotiations to narrow problematic claims, deploying formal legal notices only where justified by clear breaches. Even then, the accompanying PR strategy must frame such actions as a principled stand rather than censorship attempts.

• Political escalation. Perhaps most challenging are crises that flare up into political and financial flashpoints.

As the NatWest Group and BrewDog cases demonstrate, modern crises don't simply conclude with settlements or press statements. They live on in search results, political discourse and public memory. The answer lies in developing crisis management approaches that treat legal and PR reputation protection mechanisms not in isolation, rather as two sides of the same coin.