The Zyprexa Chronicles: Lilly Has Even More PR Problems

It's hard to believe that Lilly could look worse after settling about $1.3 billion in civil claims and being on the verge of working out a $1 billion deal with the feds in an attempt to escape federal prosecution and a raft of states lawsuits, but things just keep getting weirder and weirder around the Zyprexa story. Yesterday, news came out that last week's scoop by New York Times investigative reporter Alex Berenson on the developing federal settlement may have occurred not because the reporter has great sources but because he has the right last name.

As it turns out, according to portfolio.com, a lawyer at Lilly's main outside law firm, Pepper Hamilton, tried to email Bradford Berenson, a lawyer at another of Lilly's outside law firms. Instead, the first lawyer somehow pulled up the reporter's email in their address book--the two have similar emails addresses--and unwittingly tipped Alex B. to the pending deal with the feds. Then, Berenson, the reporter, starts making all kinds of phone calls to all kinds of sources and he appears to have inside information which Lilly thought had been leaked to him by the feds.

As a fellow reporter, all I can say is I am jealous.

Others have different thoughts. The WSJ Law Blog notes that lawyers have got to be damn careful with their emails (yeah, no kidding) and Sparkman & Associates, a corporate communications firm, notes that Lilly's handling of the PR around the Zyprexa scandal has been a "debacle."

I think one of the key mistakes Lilly made was in assuming that the story would die down and go away and that the media and the public would accept its spin. Just like with Prozac in the 1990s. Well, here we are over a year after news around leaked Zyprexa court documents broke and the story just won't go away. Lilly is of course still spinning the PR and, while I get that that's part of what corporate spokespeople are supposed to do, isn't there a time when honesty might better serve their cause?

You almost get the sense that somewhere in communications academia a PR professor is assembling a doozy of a case study. I cannot wait to see it.

Meanwhile, Ed Silverman at Pharmalot looks forward to pharma companies hiring lawyers named Silverman while I look forward to them hiring ones named Dawdy.