The role of communication in enhancing public relations in legal firms

Public relations (PR) is an emerging social science dicsipline currently lacking paradigmatic and topic diversity and strongly influenced by practice. The paradigm struggle in public relations is due, in part, to the lack of any consensus as to what constitutes public relations, stemming from the diversity of the practice itself and from its constant adaptation to society’s evolutionary change. Therefore, attempts to operationalize the constituent elements of public relations as well as develop measurement scales of those elements should be continued in order to provide empirical evidence about the phenomena of public relations, however it has not dawned on many law firms that public relations plays a paramount role to attract client as opposed to aggressive marketing and use of agency or brokers. Very few studies have documented the role of public relation in enhancing the level of performance in service provision firms .The main objective of this study is to find out the role of communication in enhancing Public Relations in Law firms. The study adopted a survey of selected Law firms found in Eldoret town it targeted 334 law firms. A sample of 101 law firms was selected for the study. Questionnaires were used to collect data .The contributions of PR include effective crisis management, interactive communication and improvement of internal and external communication .The challenges facing PR policy include lack of finance, hesitant legal partners, lack of employee training, corruption in the media houses and rigid Legal systems in place. This research recommend that Law firms train both lawyers, administrators and paralegals on the essence of effective communication in improving PR to enable them appreciate the role of communication in their daily activities, develop comprehensive policy governing effective communication and PR, social analysis to analyze the requirements and have a good media relations.