When a company crisis hits, it's tempting for in-house legal teams to opt for near silence: don't say anything that could be used in court. But some crisis management consultants say this can be exactly the wrong way to approach a bad situation.

It's a topic that's come up a lot recently, as tech giant Apple Inc. faces a preliminary French criminal probe and domestic lawsuits over claims that it purposefully slowed down older iPhones to incentivize the purchase of newer devices.

The Cupertino, California-based company released a public apology at the end of December in a post that admitted iPhones with older batteries experience slower performance. Apple's post claimed that the slower performance was introduced in an update last year to prevent the problem of random shutdowns in older phones, and wasn't intended to trick users into buying new iPhones.