Media Training

TA/SC offers standard ½ day and 1 day media training courses. Customized two and three day courses are also available. A comprehensive stand-alone media training manual is provided with the course.

Crisis Management

When client reputations are on the line, we know how important it is to react quickly to make the crisis manageable. We have the real world experience that makes us uniquely qualified to provide effective damage control in fast-changing, high-pressure situations. Preparation is a key line of defence in dealing with any crisis. We help clients develop crisis management plans to deal with even the most challenging and unexpected events and issues.

Strategic Communications

With our help, clients realize how vital it is to understand how perceptions are formed by the public, the news media and government. Advantageous positioning should not be left to chance, but should result from strategic communications planning. We work with clients to develop communications plans, help them understand how individual and corporate actions or inactions will be perceived, and how those perceptions will impact on their reputations. We help clients plan ahead by analyzing their existing positions and developing workable recommendations.

Litigation Communications Support

Litigation Communications Support is a service provided by Tactical Advice/Strategic Communications Inc. to assist lawyers manage the flow of public information around legal actions and cases.

It complements the services that lawyers provide to their clients.

The service is both strategic and tactical, providing lawyers and/or their clients with a professional communications analysis of issues and events that will, that might or that already have impacted on a particular case.

Jim Maclean provides options and advice on how to best manage public issues and events around a legal action that has attracted or that could attract media, institutional or government attention. He provides media and messaging training for lawyers and/or their clients who will be interviewed by the news media. He provides hands-on management of the public information aspects of challenging files.

Litigation Communications Support:

• is complementary to the counsel provided by solicitors to their clients assists lawyers and their clients to deliver consistent public messages
• is effective for either the prosecution or the defence
• is a form of reputation management.

For counsel who believe that public or media attention would be beneficial to their case, Jim Maclean can help generate that attention. For those who want to avoid, deflect or reduce the damage the media can inflict, he recommends and employs strategies that help limit the publicity attendant on a particular case.

Jim Maclean's experience with litigation communications support has involved, among others:

• working with defence counsel to provide media advice in a high profile medical malpractice suit
• working with counsel to a sports organization to plan and execute a media relations strategy around the release of a report on sexual abuse
• working with counsel to the board of a hospital foundation to assist in action brought against the board
• working with a developer and counsel to the developer on managing public issues around a major resort project
• working with a major Toronto hospital on an issue involving sterilization of medical instruments