Jay M. Jaffe and the Business of Being Believed

Joshua Peck had joined Jay M. Jaffe’s agency in 1995 when his boss brought an unexpected guest to lunch: a suit salesman. Jaffe wanted Peck to buy something. His reasoning was pointed. Without a law degree, Peck already faced an uphill climb with law-firm partners; looking better dressed than his audience would at least give him a useful start. Peck later made the advice a running joke. Jaffe enjoyed hearing it repeated.

It is a wonderfully economical introduction to Jaffe’s working life. There is the audience, with its assumptions. There is the adviser, who has to earn a hearing. And there is Jaffe, bringing an abstract question of professional credibility down to the cut of a jacket. His business involved helping lawyers present themselves to the world. He paid attention to how the people advising those lawyers presented themselves, too.

He could be funny about that business without treating it casually. Over a career that passed through newspapers, television, congressional communications and agency ownership, he kept returning to questions of public understanding: what people notice, what they remember, and what makes them trust the person speaking. A law firm could have considerable expertise and still need help answering all three.

The reporter before the adviser

Jaffe grew up in Chicago and was editing a school newspaper by fifth grade. Later, during his U.S. Army service in Japan, he ran a military newspaper. Back in civilian life, he worked in newspaper journalism in Augusta, Georgia, before becoming a reporter and news anchor at the local CBS television affiliate. His first professional audience was a news audience.

Washington came next. In the mid-1970s, he became press secretary to Georgia congressman Jack Flynt and then took the same kind of communications role with the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, which Flynt chaired. The route into legal marketing was therefore through reporting and public explanation, rather than the practice of law.

His later advisory work included preparing people for prominent interviews, handling difficult communications, planning business development and thinking about marketing technology. These jobs all require someone to stand outside an organization’s internal vocabulary. The reporter wants a comprehensible answer. The client wants to be understood accurately. A useful adviser has to keep both in mind.

Four words, a courthouse, a position

In 1977, the Supreme Court’s Bates decision changed the landscape for lawyer advertising. Jaffe saw room for a business devoted to helping law firms communicate. His agency dates its beginnings to 1978. The opportunity came with an awkward practical question: given more room to advertise, what should a professional firm actually say?

For Howrey & Simon, Jaffe helped supply a compact answer: “In Court Every Day.” The advertising paired the phrase with images of historically significant courthouses. Peck remembered it as a campaign that made the firm’s litigation identity vivid. A reader could understand the proposition without first becoming acquainted with a departmental chart.

The appeal of the idea is its specificity. A courthouse gives the eye somewhere to go; a short statement gives the memory something to keep. Read as a piece of communication, the campaign makes an argument about the value of choosing. Every additional claim would have competed with the first one. Four words had a job, and they were allowed to do it.

Jaffe pressed firms to distinguish themselves and to consider unfamiliar approaches. He spoke to audiences in the United States, Canada and Europe. Legal marketing gave him a specialized subject, but his audience extended beyond a single city or bar association. He was asking a profession accustomed to precision to make its public message intelligible as well.

The office could be elsewhere

His agency’s working arrangements carried a related willingness to reconsider convention. In 2010, Jaffe PR had more than 30 employees and served dozens of law firms across the country. It also operated as a fully virtual workplace. The company’s people could collaborate without sharing an office address. Jaffe himself moved from Washington to Colorado in 2005 and continued leading the business.

“Geography is no longer a hindrance.”

Jay M. Jaffe · 2010

The sentence sounds ordinary now. Its context is more interesting: an agency serving a profession closely associated with offices, credentials and physical presence had organized its own work around a different assumption. The communications had to work. Everyone’s commute did not have to end at the same reception desk.

For Vivian Hood, the arrangement was concrete. She came from Ketchum, knew media relations and wanted to continue her career while working from home. She began taking Jaffe assignments in late 1996 and joined full-time in March 1997. Her equipment included a computer, a landline and a modem. In 1998, she moved to Jacksonville, Florida. The work continued.

The details give remote work a useful human scale. A modem is less photogenic than a glass headquarters, but the employment decision it made possible lasted. Hood was still writing about that hiring moment at her 25th anniversary with the agency in 2022. In her account, flexibility and a continuing professional career belonged in the same sentence.

Terry M. Isner arrived by another route, through creative work and in-house law-firm marketing. He had followed Jaffe into Howrey’s creative world before the two had met. Later, after a move to Patton Boggs, a meeting with Jaffe led him to join the agency. The business gathered people who knew different parts of the same professional puzzle.

A different meaning for PR

By January 2010, Jaffe was making a public argument about the initials on his own letterhead. His agency changed its name from Jaffe Associates to Jaffe PR and framed PR as public reputation. The announcement was characteristically direct: the familiar public-relations model had outlived its usefulness. Changes in the economy and online communication demanded a broader approach.

The proposal joined activities that could otherwise sit in separate boxes: media relations, advertising, social networking, online content, websites, crisis communications, rankings and speaking engagements. A firm’s reputation would emerge from the combination. A newspaper appearance mattered, but so did what someone encountered after typing the firm’s name into a search box.

Jaffe had already been helping explain the tools. A 2009 lawyer-education program paired him with Harry Margolis for a discussion of using the internet to market a practice. The accompanying material treated online communities, blogging and accessible video technology as practical ways to communicate expertise. It advised beginning by listening to the conversations already happening online.

In January 2010, he was also scheduled to join legal journalist Robert Ambrogi and marketer Heather Morse Milligan on Maureen Kedes’s PR Insider radio program. Their announced subject was social media and the movement toward reputation management. The choice of company is revealing: a journalist, a law-firm marketer and an agency founder discussing how professional communication was changing.

His interests were visible in print as well. His published bylines addressed blogging, direct email campaigns and the opportunity cost of delaying website biographies after a law-firm merger. Those are unglamorous subjects with consequences. A biography left unwritten cannot explain a new colleague’s experience; an unused communications channel cannot reach anyone. The work often came down to getting useful information into circulation.

A company that could carry on

PR News inducted Jaffe into its PR People Hall of Fame in 2010. Lawdragon also named him among its legal consultants to know. These were recognitions of a long agency career, but the practical shape of his achievement can be seen in what happened after his death on November 21, 2012. The company had an executive team able to continue running it.

In July 2014, Hood, Isner and Melinda Wheeler purchased the agency from his estate. Each already had substantial experience inside the business. Hood oversaw public relations, Isner marketing and business development, and Wheeler finance and operations. They retained the Jaffe name. Continuity involved people who knew the work taking responsibility for the company that employed them.

The geography remained telling. The three owners were based in Florida, Delaware and Colorado. Their ownership announcement described a working culture that made room for parenting, art, horses, surfing and skiing. The agency’s own leadership supplied a practical demonstration of the arrangement it offered staff. A dispersed team could share a business without sharing a state.

Years later, former employee Keith Ecker recalled a particular lesson Jaffe had taught him: become a trusted adviser to clients. The advice puts the earlier suit story in perspective. Appearance might help an adviser get through a door. Remaining useful once inside required integrity, attention and worthwhile counsel. Jaffe’s influence travelled through the people he hired, as well as the campaigns he helped create.

Colorado, with Chicago still in the picture

Away from the agency, Jaffe fished, played golf and skied. His last home was Eagle, Colorado. He remained attached to the Chicago Cubs, and his daughter Sara’s move back to Chicago brought her close to the neighborhood where he had grown up. His household also included Wilson, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. There was a life around the letterhead.

The company today still describes a national team of senior consultants working virtually and serving the legal industry. Its offerings have expanded across branding, digital strategy, content and business development. That continuing organization gives Jaffe’s experiments an everyday setting: colleagues doing the work, clients needing advice, and people making their working lives fit the places they live.

The lunch with the suit salesman survives because it is funny, but also because it contains a recognizable kind of care. Jaffe wanted an employee to be heard by a demanding audience, and he had a very specific suggestion. A career spent advising lawyers could produce an elaborate philosophy of persuasion. Sometimes, in Peck’s recollection, it also produced a better jacket.