Professionally speaking
A former newspaper reporter and editor, Randy brings his journalism experience and knowledge of the media to bear on behalf of law firm clients and understands how to garner media results that help build practices and grow law firms. He provides law firms with valuable perspectives and smart ideas on how to collaborate with media to strategically leverage news, successes, knowledge and insights for positive exposure in the press. Randy’s law firm public reputation management work has encompassed developing strategic story pitches, bylined articles, press releases, website copy and other elements, as well as marketing strategies and tactics that implement a firm’s public reputation plan.
During his communications career, which spans more than 25 years, Randy has delivered high-value media placements for law firm and other service industry clients. He has served as a consultant on diverse public reputation management, marketing, and PR 2.0 strategies and campaigns that achieved tangible results and helped grow clients’ businesses.
In addition to his work for niche and general practice law firms over the last few years, Randy has more than a decade of experience in counseling diverse companies and organizations in a range of other industries. His PR successes – on behalf of financial services, non-profit association management and consumer goods companies, among others – enhance the skill set he applies to meeting law firms’ complex PR and marketing challenges.
Before joining Jaffe PR, Randy was a vice president at a small Chicago public relations and marketing agency. Among his principal clients was one of the nation’s preeminent intellectual property law firms.
Previously, Randy served in various account management roles at other public relations agencies in Chicago, including Manning Selvage & Lee, Publicis Dialog, Selz-Seabolt Communications, and Edelman Public Relations. His clients included the National Association of Independent Business, ABC Radio Networks, Procter & Gamble, Blistex and Sears.
Randy also had a stint as communications director of Great Lakes Theater Festival, a nationally renowned regional theater company in Cleveland. Before then, he worked for eight years at the News-Herald, Ohio’s largest daily suburban newspaper. As a journalist and editor, he wrote breaking news, business and features stories, and produced a weekly entertainment-focused magazine. Randy also was a news reporter at the Toledo Blade, a major metro newspaper in Ohio.
Randy earned his bachelor of arts in print journalism and Russian studies from the University of Toledo and was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists as the school’s 1987 Outstanding Graduate in Journalism. He is based in Chicago.
Personally speaking
Randy’s career in communications is enhanced by an innate sense of diplomacy – and even a bit of dry wit – that provides a model for attorneys looking to be more effective and comfortable in a media environment. Trained and experienced as a newspaper journalist, Randy uses his wealth of insider knowledge and investigative reporting instinct to serve his clients. His experiences on both side of the aisle – both representing and pitching to the media – have helped him to perfect a balanced approach for delivering invaluable media results. He carries that sense of yin and yang throughout his personal life, where he is as much at home at a Chicago Cubs baseball game as a at musical theater show. Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Randy is a now exclusively a big-city guy with an equally huge drive for enhancing the public reputations of his clients.