The phone call arrives after the pleasant options have left the room. A reporter has a question. A lawyer has a warning. Employees are trading screenshots. The board would like a statement, preferably five minutes ago. Somewhere in New Jersey, Karen Kessler asks the question that panicked people hate most: what do we actually know?
Kessler PR Group is a public relations firm, but “public” is only half the job. Founded in 1993 as Evergreen Partners, the firm specializes in crisis communications, litigation support, reputation management and media relations. Its customers include law firms, corporations, boards, hospitals, universities, banks, nonprofits, sports organizations and public figures. Some want attention. Some would pay dearly for less of it. The useful skill is telling the difference.
This is why its website contains the most persuasive anti-portfolio in the agency business: “No logos. No names.” Most firms display clients like hunting trophies. Kessler makes discretion part of the merchandise. A few engagements have surfaced publicly - New Jersey Monthly reported work connected to Conor McGregor, the New York Giants and a lawyer representing former Port Authority chairman David Samson during Bridgegate - but the broader client roster stays behind the curtain.
“We’re stealth.”Karen Kessler, describing the firm’s operating posture
The product is controlled exposure
Ordinary PR tries to increase the amount of attention. Crisis PR treats attention as a variable. Too little response and an accusation becomes the only available story. Too much, too soon, and the client creates fresh facts, contradictions and searchable clips. Kessler’s public advice lives in that narrow middle.
The exposure dial
invites inferenceHolding response
buys accuracyFull interview
needs rehearsal
Consider two pieces of guidance that appear, at first, to disagree. The firm warns clients away from “no comment” because readers often translate it into guilt. Yet it also advises against live interviews early in a crisis, when facts are incomplete and contradictory. The contradiction disappears once you see the product: not speech or silence, but a calibrated response. A short, accurate holding statement can show that leadership is present without inviting a speculative cross-examination on live television.
The firm’s five-part interview discipline is portable: select the right spokesperson, set ground rules, prepare, refuse questions that cannot responsibly be answered, and end the interview when it stops serving the objective. One detail is particularly sharp. Do not automatically send the chief executive out first. If early facts change and the boss loses credibility, there is nobody more senior to correct the record.
Facts first
Gather what is known, what is changing and what remains confidential.
One strategy
Make public language support the legal plan instead of creating a second case.
Right volume
Choose a holding line, background briefing or interview based on the job to be done.
The courtroom has acquired a comments section
Litigation support is where Kessler’s positioning becomes unusually precise. A complaint is both a legal instrument and, once published, raw material for a headline. A client can win an argument in court and lose employees, donors or customers while waiting for the decision. The communications adviser therefore works beside counsel, not on a separate publicity track.
Karen Kessler describes the firm as the interface between lawyers and media. Sometimes counsel makes the introduction; sometimes the communications firm helps a client find counsel. Either way, every statement can create a record. Chambers researchers have noted the firm’s grasp of both civil and criminal landscapes and its ability to navigate when to defer to attorneys and when to press the communications concern. The firm’s roster reinforces the point: it includes lawyers, former journalists, political communicators and people who have managed institutions under scrutiny.
That playbook has boundaries. A communications plan cannot redeem false facts, erase lawful scrutiny or substitute for operational repair. A polished message without corrective action merely gives critics a cleaner target. And Kessler’s measured pace works best when leadership shares information early. Hiring a crisis adviser after executives have freelanced contradictory explanations is still useful, but now the first job is cleanup.
Evergreen finally took its own name seriously
For nearly three decades, the business was Evergreen Partners. In 2021 it became Kessler PR Group. The explanation was refreshingly unsentimental: the old identity no longer reflected what the company did or how people knew it. A consultancy that spends its days aligning public identity with reality had discovered a mismatch in its own name.
The change also reveals how the firm grew. Kessler has said she began without a formal business plan, when crisis communications was not yet an established standalone field. The specialty formed around demand: legal controversies, executive transitions, investigations, campus disputes, social-media pile-ons and the long afterlife of search results. In 2025, NJBIZ reported $3.25 million in fees. By 2026, Chambers and Partners had recognized the firm for a third consecutive year in both crisis communications and litigation support, and ranked Karen Kessler in its top band for crisis work.
Evergreen Partners beginsKaren Kessler starts the firm before crisis communications is a familiar agency category.
The name catches upEvergreen becomes Kessler PR Group, aligning the brand with how the market already knows the practice.
The newsroom bench growsFormer Law360 editor Martin Bricketto and political communications veteran John Francis Roman join.
National recognition repeatsChambers ranks the firm in crisis communications and litigation support for a third consecutive year.
Calm is a business model
The competitive field includes global advisory firms with offices on several continents and specialist disputes shops clustered around major law firms. Kessler’s place in it is narrower and personal: a founder-led New Jersey practice with national and international reach, a pronounced legal sensibility and a willingness to let confidentiality erase much of its public proof.
Its economics are those of expert services rather than software - counsel, preparation, writing, monitoring, training and rapid response sold through custom engagements. The work may culminate in a six-line statement, but the six lines contain interviews, legal review, stakeholder mapping and arguments about every verb. The output looks small because compression is the point.
There is a lesson here for any executive, even one who never hires a crisis firm. Reputation is not repaired by volume. It is protected by making fewer unforced errors: building relationships before the emergency, rehearsing the hostile question, keeping internal and external language aligned, and resisting the urge to fill every silence. The internet rewards instant reaction. Kessler PR Group earns its fee by inserting judgment between the impulse and the post.