Hours, not weeks
A stabilised legal position and a first-moves list within the first day — crisis counsel priced by what waiting costs.
Crisis-adjacent counsel
When everything happens at once, the legal record still gets written.
Crisis-adjacent legal counsel from Aun & Co.: fast, documented decision support when a business event turns urgent and every step is a future exhibit.
Some legal moments do not arrive as cases; they arrive as chaos — a key contract collapsing mid-performance, an accusation going public, a raid on your people by a competitor, a sudden regulatory demand. Crisis-adjacent counsel is disputes-grade judgment applied at event speed: stabilising the legal position within hours, controlling what gets said and written, and making sure the decisions taken under pressure read as deliberate when examined later — because they will be examined later.
The work spans
- Immediate position assessment: exposure, deadlines, first moves
- Communication control: what is said, written, and never sent
- Evidence preservation before the situation overwrites it
- Urgent-relief readiness: injunctions and freezes on standby
- The decision log: choices documented as they are made
- A commercial partner walked out mid-project and every hour of silence sets the narrative.
- A public accusation is spreading and the instinct to respond fast is about to create exhibits.
- Key employees left together for a competitor with what looks like your pipeline.
- A regulator's urgent demand landed and the answer will bind you for years.
The first hours follow a fixed sequence: freeze the evidence, map the immediate deadlines, gate the communications — one voice, in writing, reviewed. Then decisions are taken against a rapidly drawn version of the conflict map, each one logged with its reasoning, because in crisis the file is written in real time whether anyone manages it or not. The firm's role is to make sure it is written deliberately, by your side.
04 · What you get
One controlled voice
Communications gated through review, so the pressure of the moment does not author the other side's best evidence.
A defensible record
Every decision logged with its reasoning as it is made — when the crisis becomes a case, your file shows judgment, not panic.
The firm has acted where a client's largest commercial relationship ruptured publicly within a single day. The first twenty-four hours were spent freezing the record, gating communications and preparing an urgent-relief application that ultimately never needed filing — the documented readiness itself moved the negotiation.
Described in abbreviated, anonymised form to preserve client confidentiality.
What should a business do in the first hours of a legal crisis?
Three things, in order: preserve everything — documents, messages, systems; stop unreviewed communication in every direction; and map the deadlines already running. Almost every crisis mistake that matters later belongs to one of those three failures.
Should we respond publicly to a damaging accusation?
Sometimes — but only with a response built to be read in court as well as online. Speed and legal safety can coexist when one reviewed voice speaks; the unreviewed instinctive reply is how a reputational problem becomes a liability problem.
What does crisis-adjacent engagement look like practically?
Immediate availability, a first assessment within hours of receiving the core documents, and short daily cycles: decisions proposed, taken, logged. The engagement scales down as the situation stabilises — crisis pricing ends when the crisis does.