National Web Award for TexasCityExplosion.com
For the second time in 2009, BCA Marketing has been honored with a prestigious web marketing award. The Web Marketing Association honored with the Legal Standard of Excellence Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Web Development” for the site www.texascityexplosion.com. The website, designed as an informational site to keep the media and public informed on the BP trial in 2005, features court-released documents, terms of the settlement, video from the deposition and trial and a full press room archive chronicling news reports over the course of the litigation. Jay Jackson, BCA’s Director of Communications, said, “We worked very closely with attorney Eric Newell on this site. Eric had a great vision for how to present the information in a manner that was succinct, powerful and took advantage of a medium that allowed us to combine both video and text.”
Texas City Explosion.com (TCE.com) was created in the wake of the 2005 BP plant explosion. Built as a model for a new kind of web-based, single case, legal PR strategy, TCE.com released hundreds of key documents used in trial, video testimony from hours of depositions and live video recorded from the Texas City trial to the world media. The site is equipped with behind-the-scenes videos with the Lead Plaintiff’s Attorney, Brent Coon, on all of the aspects of the plant explosion, including BP’s settlement with Eva Rowe. In addition to cutting edge transparency, TCE.com also includes interactive forms, online petitions, and polls and blogs to go with hundreds of articles detailing the case. The site was the centerpiece of a national debate and was discussed on 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
In addition to the WMA award, the site has also drawn high praise from titans on the legal Public Relations Community. TCE.com was innovative enough to draw rave reviews from Robert Bork, Jr., one of the nation’s most noted public relations strategists. Bork wrote on his website, “ Why the last minute settlement? Perhaps it had something to do with the plans of the United Steel Workers Union to webcast the trial live on its website, TexasCityExplosion.com. We've built a number of websites to defend our corporate clients -- pretty good ones, we must say -- but this one is a masterpiece of litigation pr. Hey, even if you're on the other side, you have to appreciate the craft.” Ironically, the “other side”, BP’s defense, was quoted as saying, “Never have we seen one case receive so much publicity or been marketed so effectively – it is truly unprecedented in the history of litigation.”
TCE continues to generate a significant amount of traffic, while serving as a paradigm for an aggressive new strategy in litigation PR.
