Gina F. Rubel had an appealing business opportunity in front of her and a deadline her team could not reasonably meet. She liked the prospective client. She wanted the work. She also knew what accepting the timetable would require. So she said no. The other side extended the deadline. A conversation that might have ended with an exhausted team instead left her feeling respected.
It is a small episode, the sort that rarely survives into an entrepreneur’s official biography. Yet it explains something about the founder of Furia Rubel Communications. After building a career helping lawyers decide what to say, she has become equally interested in the decisions that come before the words. Which clients should you accept? Which promises can you keep? What are you prepared to defend once your name is on the door?
Her agency, founded in 2002, advises law firms and corporate leaders on public relations, litigation communications and crises. Rubel remains its CEO and general counsel. The two titles belong together. She understands both the urge to win an argument and the consequences of having that argument in public.
A Philadelphia education, beginning at home
Rubel grew up in Philadelphia in an Italian Catholic family where the legal profession was familiar territory. Her father, Richard Furia, was a lawyer. She remembers his opposition to stereotypes about Italian Americans and his work representing people from marginalized communities. At home, his friends included Jewish, Black and Latino lawyers. Different backgrounds belonged around the same dinner table.
She calls it a “we household.” School widened that circle further, introducing her to classmates from other countries and communities. Her account of inclusion begins with these ordinary encounters: who came to dinner, whom her father represented, whose experience she learned to take seriously. There is something refreshingly domestic about that origin. Before there were conference panels about belonging, there were guests.
At Drexel University, she studied corporate communications, graduating in 1991. A law degree from Widener followed in 1994. Pennsylvania admitted her to practice on November 22 that year; her attorney registration remains active. The communications education preceded the legal credential. Looking back, the route has more continuity than the phrase “career change” usually allows.
The interview question that joined two careers
Her early legal work included a judicial clerkship and litigation. By 1999, she had moved to the suburbs and was seeking work closer to home. A communications role at video-on-demand company Vivid Technology gave her practical experience outside a law firm. When the company was acquired, another connection led her to direct marketing.
At Roska Direct, founder Jon Roska wanted to know why an attorney wanted to work in his business. Rubel’s answer connected audience, message and response: lawyers and marketers both need to understand whom they are addressing and what they want that audience to do. Roska became a mentor. Subsequent agency jobs helped her learn the business she would eventually run.
In April 2002, she began consulting. Roska became an early client, and relationships with lawyers helped supply legal work. Her explanation for starting out included independence and time for her children. Entrepreneurship offered a chance to shape both the work and the conditions under which she did it. The ambition was specific enough to fit a household as well as a business plan.
Drexel University
Widener University
founded
published
The trouble with “no comment”
Lawyers are trained to consider what a statement might concede. Public audiences are considering other things too: whether someone understands their concern, whether an institution appears competent, whether silence feels evasive. Rubel works at that intersection. A legally careful sentence still has to reach a human being.
In discussing crisis preparation with lawyer and coach Elise Holtzman, she has urged firms to plan before trouble arrives and cautioned against the reflexive “no comment.” Her subjects include internal training, cyber incidents, and the relationship between communications inside an organization and statements made outside it. A crisis plan has to accommodate the people who will actually use it.
The attraction of preparation is easy to understand. When a difficult question lands, a firm may also be trying to establish facts, coordinate its leaders and respond to clients. Deciding who will speak at that moment adds another task to an already crowded desk. Rubel’s work asks leaders to settle as much as they can while there is still time to think.
She also makes an elementary distinction that can disappear beneath professional jargon. A corporate lawyer addressing in-house counsel has a different audience from a lawyer speaking to individuals and families. The vocabulary, examples and explanation should change accordingly. Latin has its uses; winning over a worried reader is seldom one of them.
Her public conversations with Doug Simon range from those audience choices to the everyday reasons a firm might speak: opening an office, adding a practice, announcing a merger. She treats public relations as an ongoing business activity. The emergency statement and the ordinary announcement both depend on knowing what matters to the listener.
Putting the advice between covers
Rubel has spent years turning that work into material other people can use. Everyday Public Relations for Lawyers reached its second edition in 2019. In 2023 came Everyday PR: Harnessing Public Relations to Build Relationships, Brands & Businesses, which brought a broader business audience into the conversation.
The newer book covers planning, working with journalists, writing press releases, internal communications and incorporating inclusion and social responsibility into a message. Its recurring word, “everyday,” does useful work. Public relations is easier to imagine as the exciting phone call from a reporter. Rubel is interested in the planning and relationships that make the call worthwhile.
The American Bar Foundation marked the book’s release in July 2023, identifying her as a Pennsylvania Fellow. Her professional affiliations also include the College of Law Practice Management. These connections place her within a legal community she continues to serve, even though the work has carried her beyond litigation.
Her microphone reaches a different audience again. On Record PR, launched in March 2020, gives her room to talk with lawyers, journalists, business leaders and legal marketers. Co-hosting allows her to keep asking questions, a useful occupation for someone paid to advise other people. The format leaves space for an answer longer than a social post.
A reputation has a neighborhood
Some of Rubel’s institutional work is quite practical. She created the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Law Firm Risk Management Committee. She has also served the Justinian Foundation, which supports law-school scholarships, and volunteered with Pearl S. Buck International. A cultural mission trip with that organization took her to the Philippines.
In 2017, she joined the founding group and board of Women Owned Law, an association for women legal entrepreneurs. Its purpose included networking, visibility and support for women starting or growing legal businesses. The connection makes sense for someone who had already moved through practice, agency employment and ownership. Each position exposes a different set of questions about how a career can be built.
Recognition has followed those overlapping interests. PRSA Philadelphia presented her with its Maxine Elkin Award for Distinguished Service in 2013. In 2026, Chambers listed her in both its nationwide crisis communications and litigation communications rankings. That June, she was named to the Philadelphia Titan 100. The honors span business leadership, communications practice and professional service rather than a single job description.
The office, the farm, the blank canvas
Away from client work, Rubel and her husband raised two children on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her publisher’s biography makes room for dogs and farm animals alongside the professional history. It is a welcome interruption to the usual procession of credentials. Animals are unlikely to be moved by a favorable directory ranking.
In a September 2025 conversation on SolFul Connections, she talked about family change as her children pursued their own plans, and about a developing interest in art. Painting adds another form of expression to a career already organized around language and audiences. The public story allows for curiosity beyond the business she founded.
That curiosity also appears in smaller professional moments. When she heard a claim that LinkedIn hashtags were dead, she searched a conference hashtag, found posts and asked colleagues what the evidence showed. It was a modest question, asked publicly. For a communications adviser, being willing to investigate a familiar tool may be more revealing than announcing that every new tool will change everything.
“Number one is integrity.”Gina Rubel · The Rainmaking Podcast, 2026
What she is willing to promise
By August 2026, Rubel was talking with Scott Love about turning down business. She described prospective clients who seek retribution, block necessary collaboration or expect publicity their story cannot support. These are problems an agency can inherit before it writes a word. A signed engagement can bring obligations that enthusiasm alone will not resolve.
“Number one is integrity,” she said when asked about her values. Transparency, collaboration and respect followed. She also described practicing the improvisational habit of “yes, and”: sometimes work can be accepted later, when there is capacity to do it properly. Refusal can leave room for a future conversation.
The deadline story belongs here. Rubel had enough interest in the work to regret losing it, and enough confidence in her team’s limits to risk that loss. The prospective client listened. After decades spent studying how a message reaches an audience, she had offered a short, candid account of what her agency could deliver. Someone on the other side believed her.