A palpable sense of crisis emanated from US firm Jones Day's London arm, Jones Day Gouldens, last Friday (23 May).

At least that is the impression Legal Week could not help but get when our attempts to talk to the firm about the redundancy programme it is instituting, just months after its merger, were met with a brick wall.

Perhaps the firm's marketing team and senior partners thought they could keep a lid on the story by the simple expedient of refusing to return our calls – and getting off the phone as quickly as possible whenever we did manage to get through to a human being.

If that is the case, they were sorely mistaken. We exclusively revealed the story on our website on the Friday – and it was subsequently reported by The Financial Times.

If the cuts were not bad enough – and they are at the upper end of the scale for a City operation – the episode has left this particular magazine with the impression that the firm has put a group of headless chickens in charge of its public relations machine.

Given that Jones Day has just taken over one of London's best mid-sized firms, we would suggest that this is not a particularly sensible way of winning over an increasingly sceptical UK market. The affair certainly throws light on the almost overnight transformation of Gouldens from an accessible, engaging partnership into a group of individuals apparently intensely uncomfortable with their own image in the market.

At the very least, some of the much-discussed differences between a US parent famed for its centralised decision-making and a notoriously idiosyncratic UK practice appear to be taking their toll.

Ten years ago, Jones Day Gouldens' behaviour would not have been unusual. But most major firms have now woken up to the need for an efficient PR operation.

That does not mean to say that the majority of firms get it right – but at least they are making an effort, and are learning by their mistakes.

And one trait Legal Week constantly sees recurring is the tendency for law firms to put their heads in the sand when they feel beleaguered in the hope the problem will go away. They should, in fact, be doing the opposite – and explaining their position as clearly and frequently as they can in the circumstances.

It is no coincidence that the partners at Slaughter and May – a firm that gets a sympathetic hearing in the press – are more accessible to the media than those at almost any other firm.