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Six years into his second career as a partner with Toronto law firm Goodman and Carr LLP, Mr. Honickman these days acts mainly as a litigator. But he's spending a growing amount of his time leveraging his old reporting skills to provide media training services to corporate clients such as First Canadian Title as an adjunct to his legal practice.

"There's not a corporation now that doesn't say, 'Wait a minute, what's our media plan?' " says Mr. Honickman, who credits the growing demand for media training to the explosion in shareholder class-action lawsuits and the rise of corporate governance concerns in the wake of accounting and insider trading scandals.

While former journalists have been morphing into media consultants for decades, Mr. Honickman, whose legal clients include the Toronto Sun, boasts the added credential of being an expert in defamation law.

While First Canadian Title hasn't had to deal with a corporate scandal, Ms. de Sousa's boss says Mr. Honickman's appeal is that he's not only a seasoned reporter, but also a lawyer with a strong grasp of issues that can land an executive or other spokesperson on the wrong side of a liability claim.

The session with Ms. de Sousa, held in a company boardroom with camera and playback screen to review the performance, was the latest in a series Mr. Honickman has held for First Canadian Title.

He not only helps his own legal clients but has also been retained as a media coach by other Goodman and Carr clients as well as outside law firms, including two of the country's largest.

Indeed, in a world where shows such as Larry King Live regularly pore over the legal nitty-gritty of sensational cases from the O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson trials to the Enron and Tyco scandals, sharp-tongued lawyers such as Ann Coulter, Alan Dershowitz and Nancy Grace have become celebrities.

Mr. Honickman himself helped blaze the trail, if in a modestly Canadian way, with his own show, Legal Briefs, a weekly one-hour call-in program airing on Court TV Canada and CITY-TV's sister station, Cable Pulse 24.

Mr. Honickman says there are several Canadian lawyers whom he considers naturals in front of the camera, such as criminal defence stars Edward Greenspan and Clayton Ruby, class-action plaintiff's counsel Harvey Strosberg and corporate litigator Alan Lenczner.

At the age of 39, he enrolled in Osgoode Hall Law School, assisted in part by recommendation letters from Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Ruby, who got to know him while he covered their criminal cases.

But his greatest debt, he says, is to his school teacher wife and the generosity of Stephen Hurlbut, CITY-TV's vice-president of news programming, who allowed him to continue reporting weekends and during summer breaks.

After articling with litigation firm Lerners LLP, he set up a sole practice and started marketing himself as a part-time media coach to law firms around Toronto. One of those firms was Goodman and Carr, whose managing partner, Gary Luftspring, decided he could use a defamation specialist.

A few years ago, Mr. Honickman was asked by Peter Hogg, then the dean of Osgoode, to teach a course in entertainment and sports law. "I discovered that Lorne was absolutely brilliant and was a superb advocate as well, and this was just while he was a student," says Mr. Hogg, now a lawyer at Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP.

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