Stephen Harper waves as he walks off the stage after giving his concession speech following Canada's federal election in Calgary, October 19, 2015.MARK BLINCH/Reuters
This week, the top brass at global law firm Dentons were brainstorming all the ways former prime minister Stephen Harper could fit onto their team and help their clients in Canada and beyond.
Chairman Joseph Andrew wants one thing to be crystal clear: When Mr. Harper, who announced his affiliation with Dentons as a consultant in its Calgary office on Monday, gets his first mandate, it will have nothing to do with lobbying.
"This is not about influencing legislation. You hire a lobbyist to do that. The [former] prime minister is not a lobbyist," Mr. Andrew said during a phone interview from a San Francisco hotel where the law firm's board and leadership committee were holding meetings to discuss strategy.
Related: Where are our former PMs now? How Harper compares with his predecessors
Analysis: Stephen Harper was Canada's true father of federation
Mr. Andrew says the role of former politicians at Dentons isn't to be backroom influencers. They are not just a marketing gimmick, either. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien, for one, is a lawyer at the firm in Ottawa. Elevated regulatory and political risks are keeping executives, directors and investors up at night in a slew of industries from resources to telecom to banking.
How might Mr. Harper, who is not a lawyer, earn his keep at the law firm that bills itself as the world's largest by head count? With his ideas.
"This is about giving people advice on global trends, global issues, how Canada fits into that and doing what prime minister Harper and prime minister Chrétien have always been good at, which is representing Canada," Mr. Andrew added.
Makes sense, in theory. But Mr. Andrew and Chris Pinnington, the chief executive officer of Dentons in Canada who also spoke by phone, are mum about how this actually works in practice, citing solicitor-client privilege.
They said clients rarely approach Dentons just to seek out the advice of a former politician. Instead, they expect Mr. Harper, when called upon to consult the firm's long-standing clients, will be a member of a larger team of people with a wide set of skills who work in several countries.
For Dentons, aligning with Mr. Harper as he tries to build a career after politics is just one cog in a much larger wheel. It is part of a strategy rooted in the diversity of thought, which Mr. Andrew and Mr. Pinnington say allows complex problems to be evaluated from 40,000 feet high and four inches away.
Just how Dentons has tried to execute this strategy has been bold for a law firm. It has ballooned in size by being an legal industry consolidator.
Dentons operates in 145 offices in 59 countries, Mr. Andrew says. It employs more than 7,300 lawyers who represent more of the world's 200 largest companies "than any other law firm, ever, in the history of the planet," he said.
The Achilles heel of many law firms, according to Dentons, is that they focus too much on the law and not enough on the bigger picture: That money has no bounds. Dentons has hired lawyers, scientists and people with PhDs to be specialists and has aligned with former politicians and statesmen to be generalists.
Most lawyers "can describe one piece of the elephant but none of them can tell you what the elephant looks like. And clients, that's what they don't like about law firms," Mr. Andrew said.
So Dentons is striving to become as close to a one-stop shop and is persuading clients that they don't need to hire armies of accountants and consultants in addition to lawyers, keeping more of the revenues at Dentons.
"If you can't provide clients this larger kind of advice, they're going to go someplace else to find it and they're going to assemble it," he added.
Most large companies have former regulators and politicians on their boards and in the corner offices. Dentons wants to be built like its clients.
"[CEOs] see [politicians] as peers. Being a peer of a CEO is what makes them so valuable," Mr. Andrew said.