The House of Lords Constitution Committee in November 2025 published a compelling report highlighting concerns over the undermining of the rule of law, deliberately or inadvertently.

The committee’s report ‘Rule of law: holding the line between anarchy and tyranny’, followed an inquiry launched amid concerns about the decline of the rule of law globally.

“The rule of law is one of the core constitutional principles underpinning the UK’s democracy,” it warned, adding: “We must not be complacent about the strength of the rule of law in the UK. Without a strong rule of law tradition and sense of values, we risk mob rule and anarchy. There is a sense that laws are being broken without consequence, including by public figures, which is diminishing public support for the rule of law.”

This would be bad enough in and of itself, but it comes with concerns that a deepening complexity in securing remedies is seeping into the field of reputation management, where AI and mass technologies in particular are enabling attacks on reputation at scale. It is a phenomenon which hits corporates and individuals alike.

This was highlighted at the recent panel discussion hosted by Matrix Chambers, Digitalis and DRD Partnership.

According to DRD Founding Partner, Claire Davidson: “We are outsourcing our reputations through all sorts of mechanisms that we have online. So, if you think about your firm, you think about your clients, all the information channels that they’re presently using are being scraped. So, unless you’re in control of that narrative, you’re just allowing other people to set your narrative for you.”

James Hann, Partner at Digitalis, took the issue one step further, by examining the role of LLMs (Large Language Models) in fashioning reputation: “We’re really thinking about two large buckets of data. On the one hand, you have training data, all of the information which comes from databases. The second area is on retrieval augmented generation, and that is what pretty much all of the models now have, which is the ability to access real time information from across the internet.”

What shocks many is that LLMs are not ‘looking up information’ on the web. “They might be relying on an index, but they are still fundamentally predicting and guessing the next word. And is it the lack of understanding and the ‘guessing the next word effect’ which leads to either mistakes or hallucination.”

It is a wake-up call for those concerned with reputation management and handling client crises. And it has generated an important check-list of the key steps that can be taken when faced by a reputational issue that is made worse by an eroded respect for the rule of law and an unpredictable and sometimes deliberately distorted representation generated through bot activity. The key actions in reputation management in this new environment are

1. Ensure your ‘owned’ assets online – website, social media platforms and related matter – are consistently optimised for pick-up by LLMs.
2. Focus on gaining earned content in highly-ranked news and media platforms and aggregators.
3. Undertaking regular monitoring of your reputation online using specialist tools.
4. Take corrective action as soon as issues arise.
5. Use specialist media lawyers if you suspect attempts – successful or otherwise – are being made to undermine your reputation.

For more information about our panel discussion with Matrix Chambers and Digitalis, see here.