Chapter 4 & 5

First of all I would like to say that chapter 4 was the most difficult chapter I have come across so far. But after reading the topic about legal environments I did not know that legal rights were such a big deal for the public relation team, but the chapter has clearly shown how important laws are to PR practitioners. I understood that law is a big part of public relation practitioners in their day to day work.

In chapter 5 the author has tried to explain about how ethics is related to public relations. More and more organizations are making sure that they have good ethics both inside and outside their organisation. It is a must for the community to see a company is acting ethically or else they would not buy their products. Therefor more organizations are now paying attention to the ethical standards they have.

Law is something that sets the rules on how people are to treat people and conduct their way of doing business. It is an individual’s job to make sure he/she knows who they are to be in the bounds of the law because if the law is broken things might get very difficult. So to be able to play safe people need to come up with strategies to minimize their chance of taking a legal risk. As mentioned by the author PR is about communication, counseling/advising and managing the business but al these needs to be done in a way where legal risks are evaluated and strategies are planed to manage them. PR practitioners should be aware of the law protecting the administrative justice. As we all know PR is a job that includes a lot of creative work that would be an asset to the organizations, thus to keep it from being copied by others actions needs to be taken in other words law needs to be used as copyrights or property law.

The decision that the public relations team makes needs to be in context with the legal environment, and there should be assigning of the risks involved as public relations relies on trust, honesty and having a positive image. They need to find out how harm can be minimized by negotiating strategies with their lawyers. One important fact that all of us need to keep in our minds is to protect our reputations, be it a company or person, as legal issues can affect o at some point damage reputations and relationships. So to avoid this from happening the PR team needs to work from the beginning by paying attentions in the way they are promoting a product or in an advertising campaign. Many times when companies have a damage control situation they look at the PR department to fix their problem. At the same time it is the PR team’s job to be well aware of the legal rights of the case or client they get involved with.
If a case dose get to court there is the contempt of court that needs to be followed. This states what can be published or even how people are to conduct themselves in court. At tat point PR practitioners are to inform their clients on how to handle press and make sure they don’t give out a judgmental statement that can be used against them in court.
Properties in public relations are known as real, personal and intellectual. Real property is referred to land or fixed assets, pr needs to look into this rights with they wanted to get into a property or do a show at a location. Personal property includes things like cars or office equipments. This is not that important but if needed ca be shows as the proof of ownership. Intellectual property law protects the property right in the creative segment. Copyright is an important factor when comes to creativity, no one would want their own idea being used by their rive organization. Thus it protects and gives the rights the owners for their work. So f someone wants to put something on the internet they would need to get the permission of the copyright owner.
Contracts in the public relations are a way of defining relationships. This would be employing a staff or ordering from suppliers. Contrasts are usually stander unless additional information is required. As businesses are becoming global so is the public relations legal environment and this is increasing a form of electronic contacts. Be it electronic or traditional form, contracts are good ways of setting the barriers on how the business is to be conducted and it also helps in clearing up any uncertainty.
Public relations must work within the legal and ethical environment. By do so they need to have a good systematic way of dealing with the law and the ethical standerts they follow. If this is achieved they would surely reduce they chance of getting into a real legal mess or losing customers from bad publicity.