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Few public relations crises are as nightmarish for a corporation as an eye-popping verdict drawing a correlation between its product and cancer.

But that's just what's happened to German pharmaceutical company Bayer, which worked out a $66 billion deal to acquire St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. shortly before a jury in San Francisco found that exposure to its Roundup weed killer was to blame for a school groundskeeper's terminal cancer.

Now, Monsanto and Bayer, which continue to operate independently, according to a Bayer spokesman, are trying to get out ahead of the storm of negative publicity.

As part of the effort, Monsanto's in-house lawyers have been working “hand in glove” with the company's internal communications staff to mitigate the fallout from the $289 million Roundup verdict, said Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of global strategy.

“Today the need for communications folks to stay very close to the public side of what the law department does is just critical,” Partridge, who is a former chief deputy counsel at Monsanto, told Corporate Counsel in an interview this week.

Partridge noted that Monsanto's public relations reps were in court during “critical parts” of the Roundup trial: “Coordinating with [the lawyers] to make sure the comments are … appropriate is a real effort that has to happen quickly. It is a remarkably close and efficient relationship,” he said.

He added that “staying in close touch with our growers and the public about this is critical. It's a fulsome effort that goes beyond media.”

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Monsanto is handling the fallout without a GC at the helm—David Snively, who had been with the company since 1984 retired earlier this summer after the Bayer deal was completed.

It's no doubt been a challenging couple of weeks for Monsanto—litigation PR is tough even if there aren't millions of dollars and big public-image issues at stake. But not every observer believes Monsanto has taken every step it can to maximize success.

“From what I can tell they haven't been doing a very good job of getting the information out about the science and that's what they're now going to have to get serious about,” said Thom Weidlich, managing director of PRCG Haggerty in New York. The firm specializes in litigation communications, crisis management and media-relations strategy.

“Now that they've lost this big verdict, it's about getting some pretty granular information out there about why they think the verdict is wrong and the science is on their side,” he added.  

Weidlich noted that he had trouble quickly locating anything substantive on Monsanto's website in response to the Roundup verdict, which was the first decision in a suit tying the product to cancer.

The company posted a 98-word statement on Aug. 10—the day of the Roundup verdict—in which it expressed sympathy for the plaintiff and his family while also asserting that hundreds of scientific studies have concluded that Roundup does not cause cancer.

“We will appeal this decision and continue to vigorously defend this product, which has a 40-year history of safe use and continues to be a vital, effective, and safe tool for farmers and others,” the company said.

But the top news release on the homepage of Monsanto's main website on Aug. 14 was about the Bayer merger and was issued in June. And a banner post on the “News & Stories” section of the site centered on honey bees.

General Electric Co.'s former general counsel and senior vice president, Brackett Denniston, who now serves as senior counsel at Goodwin Procter's litigation department in Boston, said a general counsel facing a corporate crisis must focus simultaneously on several internal and external elements of damage control, such as meeting with board members and working with outside public relations experts.  

Brackett believed Monsanto had “made a pretty fair case, which is on causation and there's never been any science to support causation.” But he added that “you want other people [outside the company] making the same point.”

“You don't want it just coming out of the spokesperson's mouth or the head of litigation's mouth,” he said. “You want it coming out of other lawyers or professionals who make the point. You're talking third parties who have a view on it.”

He added that Monsanto appears to have strong grounds for an appeal—and history is on its side.  

“The list of big verdicts like this that get overturned is a long one,” he said. “The trick is don't panic and look long and stay cool.”