Coordinating Criminal Defence with the Communications Agency Without Breaching Professional Secrecy

When a criminal investigation reaches a high-profile client, two teams with different objectives coexist: the criminal defence team, focused on the procedural strategy, and the communications agency, focused on reputation. If they work separately, their messages end up contradicting each other and the damage multiplies. Coordination between the two is not a luxury: it is the only way to prevent image management from compromising the defence, or a leak from leading to criminal liability. As a criminal law firm specialising in coordination with the communications agency, we explain how this protocol is structured and where its legal limits lie.

What Defence-Communications Coordination Is

Coordination between criminal defence and the communications agency is the governance layer that sits between the lawyer's procedural strategy and the client's public response. It does not replace either team: it integrates them under a common command. The premise is invariable: in a criminal case, the priority is the defence, and communication is subordinate to it.

The high-exposure client usually arrives with their own ecosystem of advisors —family office, communications agency, commercial firms, tax advisors. Criminal defence does not replace them, it coordinates them. Without that single command, the most frequent risk is that different voices issue uncoordinated messages that end up harming the investigated person's procedural position.

Why They Cannot Work Separately

Each team reasons with its own logic. The communications agency seeks to occupy the public space, react quickly and build a favourable narrative. The criminal defence, by contrast, knows that everything said can have procedural consequences: a hasty public statement can contradict the version later maintained before the court, or hand the prosecution material it did not have.

The classic problem is one of speed. Communications wants to respond to the first headline; the defence needs time to understand the scope of the investigation before settling on a line. When there is no coordination, media pressure imposes its own pace and a message is improvised that then shapes the entire strategy. To coordinate means, precisely, that it is the defence —and not the clock of the news cycle— that sets the tempo.

Professional Secrecy: Art. 199 CP

The central legal limit of any coordination protocol is professional secrecy. Information in a criminal case is sensitive and cannot circulate freely among all of the client's advisors. A person who learns it through their work or their employment relationship and reveals it without authorisation may commit an offence.

Article 199 of the Criminal Code (CP) punishes the disclosure of another person's secrets in two forms:

• Art. 199.1 CP: whoever reveals another person's secrets that they know through their work or their employment relationships, with imprisonment of one to three years and a fine of six to twelve months.
• Art. 199.2 CP: the professional who, in breach of their duty of confidentiality or reserve, discloses another person's secrets, with imprisonment of one to four years, a fine of twelve to twenty-four months and special disqualification from that profession for two to six years.

The distinction matters: paragraph 2 aggravates the conduct when the person who leaks is a professional bound to confidentiality. In a high-profile client's ecosystem —advisors, internal collaborators, service providers— the risk of an inadvertent disclosure is real, and the coordination protocol largely exists to prevent it.

How the Flow of Information Is Controlled

The operational core of coordination is the control of the flow of information. The point is not to keep the communications agency from what it needs in order to work, but to ensure it receives only what is necessary and in the right terms. The usual tools are:

• Document segregation: sensitive case documentation is not shared indiscriminately; what the agency needs is separated from what must remain within the defence circle.
• Access restriction: it is defined who has access to which information, avoiding the proliferation of copies and forwarding.
• Written confidentiality agreements: they document each participant's duty of confidentiality and serve as evidence of the commitment undertaken.
• Secure channels: sensitive communications are handled through controlled routes, not through open messaging or unprotected email.
• Validated messaging: no statement goes out without passing through the defence's filter, which checks that it does not reveal confidential proceedings or contradict the strategy.

The Coordination Protocol

In practice, coordination is structured through a protocol that orders the relationship between all the actors involved. Its basic rules are:

• Who decides what: the criminal defence sets the limits of what can be communicated; the communications agency executes within those limits.
• A single voice: the proliferation of spokespeople and contradictory messages is avoided.
• Shielding professional secrecy: the circulation of sensitive information is restricted and access is controlled.
• Synchronising timing: procedural action and public communication are scheduled so as not to contradict each other at the key milestones —statement, opening of the trial, judgment.
• Prepared messaging: responses to foreseeable scenarios are anticipated, so that no statement is improvised under pressure.

The communications coordination page sets out how this layer is integrated with the rest of the defence strategy for the high-reputation client.

Professional Secrecy and the Secrecy of the Proceedings

Two limits that operate in parallel should not be confused. The professional secrecy of art. 199 CP protects the client's confidential information against anyone who learns it through their work or employment relationship. The secrecy of the proceedings additionally protects what the judge declares confidential within the case, and its disclosure by a lawyer or court agent has its own criminal offence in art. 466 CP. A serious coordination strategy takes both into account at once: it is not enough that a message does not contradict the defence; it also must not leak what is covered by the secrecy of the investigation, nor disclose the client's personal or business secrets.

In practice, this means that every statement is examined on two levels. First, the strategic level: whether what is to be said helps or harms the procedural position. Second, the level of lawfulness: whether the content respects professional secrecy and the secrecy of the proceedings. A message may be strategically useful and yet legally inadmissible because it reveals confidential information. That is why final validation rests with the defence, which is the party that knows the scope of both limits.

Common Mistakes When There Is No Coordination

Experience shows a recurring set of failures when defence and communications operate without a common protocol:

• The premature rebuttal statement: issued to stop the first headline, it fixes a version before the full scope of the investigation is known and may be contradicted by the case file itself.
• The proliferation of spokespeople: when the client, their circle and various advisors all speak at once, diverging nuances are read as contradictions.
• The internal leak: sensitive documentation that circulates through open channels and ends up in the hands of third parties, with the attendant risk under art. 199 CP.
• The reflex complaint: reacting to every publication with hasty legal actions that reignite the media focus instead of dampening it.
• The miscalculated total silence: always keeping quiet is not neutral either; at times it hands third parties the building of the narrative with no counterweight.

Each of these mistakes is avoidable with foresight. The coordination protocol does not guarantee an outcome, but it does order decision-making so that nothing is improvised under the pressure of the moment.

What Coordination Offers

The main contribution is coherence. When communication is decided from within the defence and not outside it, the risk that a hasty message compromises the client's procedural position is reduced. The case's confidential information is protected, the disclosure of professional secrets is prevented, and different advisors are stopped from pulling in opposite directions.

There is a second, less visible but decisive benefit: operational calm. A clear protocol frees the client and their circle from having to decide, in the heat of the moment and under media pressure, what to say and what to keep quiet. Those decisions are already mapped out and validated, which makes it possible to respond in an orderly way even at moments of greatest media tension.

Defence and Communications Coordination in Madrid and Throughout Spain

The criminal law firm Alonso Sala, based at Calle Velázquez 27 in Madrid and with coverage throughout Spain, coordinates the criminal defence of high-profile clients with their communications agency. We work on controlling the flow of information, shielding professional secrecy under art. 199 of the Criminal Code, and the messaging protocols around the milestones of the proceedings, always with the priority of the defence strategy.