Bruce M. Hennes is CEO of Hennes Communications, one of the few firms in North America focused exclusively on crisis management and crisis communications. Hennes Communications serves government agencies, corporations, manufacturers, education and healthcare institutions -- as well as law firms and their clients -- that are “on trial” in the Court of Public Opinion.
With over 40 years’ experience in communications, Bruce and the firm’s past and present clients include the non-partisan Cleveland Host Committee for the 2016 Republican National Convention, the American Public Power Association, Avery Dennison, Lubrizol, Kent State University and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with scores of law firms and municipalities across the continent.
Bruce has served for eleven years on the executive committee of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association; he is a four-time keynote speaker at the ABA’s Bar Leadership Institute and he presents more than 40 CLE’s a year on the subject of Crisis Management for Attorneys & Their Clients. Bruce also chairs the Selection Committee for Leadership Cleveland and he’s an adjunct professor at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs. He also serves on the faculty of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Leadership Academy and the Ohio Certified Public Manager Program. In 2011, he received the Communicator of the Year award from the International Association of Business Communicators – Cleveland, and in 2013, a Gold “Rocks” award and “Best of Show” award from the Public Relations Society of America, Greater Cleveland Chapter, for his crisis communications work related to a ferry boat crash in New York City’s Financial District. In addition, he was named one of the “50 Game-Changers of PR for 2017” by industry publication PRNews. More recent, he was named to the Lawdragon 100 Leading Consultants and Strategists, the definitive guide to the financiers, recruiters, marketing and communication gurus on whom the legal profession relies. According to Lawdragon, "These are 100 of the most trusted advisors to the legal profession." The National Law Review also named him as a 2020 “Go-To Thought Leader,” which recognized 71 legal authors selected from a pool of over 20,000 legal news articles published by the NLR in 2020.
