BURTON TAYLOR
<Staff Writer>
On Monday March 12th, Navigator Limited’s Jaime Watt came to give a talk to Ronald Podolny’s seminar class on Assessment of Litigation and Regulatory Risk. The topic of his talk was law and politics and the “cross pressures” that can occur when politics and law meet.
For those unfamiliar with Jaime Watt, his day job is as the Executive Chairman and Senior Partner at the public relations firm Navigator. “When you can’t afford to lose,” reads the slogan on the firm’s slick website. The firm’s bold aim is to bring the “discipline of the ‘winner takes all’ in the environment of political campaigns” to business.
For those who do know Jaime Watt, it is more likely than not that you know him as a political panelist on CBC’s The National and Evan Solomon’s Power & Politics. On Power & Politics, the affable Watt leads a segment called “Political Traction”, where he tracks whether a given political story in Ottawa has traction with Canadians across the county. With sets of colourful charts and charm, Watt offers insight as to whether political stories, like as Robocalls or Vikileaks, are registering outside the Ottawa bubble.
On Peter Mansbridge’s The National, Watt sits as a member of “The Insiders” segment. Here, Watt joins David Herle and Kathleen Monk to make sense of the strategies of political parties in Canada. It is the political equivalent to “Coaches Corner”.
Watt’s talk at Podolny seminar discussed how public relation firms, like Navigator, work beside law firms in making a deal. He did so by walking through the deal process and using examples throughout.
Watt offered the failed London Stock Exchange (LSE) merger with the Toronto Stock Exchange and the failed PotashCorp sale as two recent examples of how politics can be as much a deciding factor in a deal as the law.
The lesson from the failed LSE-TSX merger deal, Watt said, was that if the police don’t get you, the bullies will. He thought that a big problem going into the deal was a belief that the exchange merger would be seen as a business story in the media. This was not the case. After the proposed deal was announced, it became a contentious political story. And because this was not anticipated, it was hard to get ahead of, and shape the story. The story that formed around the deal became one of foreign control. Ultimately, the deal did not go through.
Watt argued that the deal might have been more successful had been framed as a story about Canada’s integration into the global market.
The takeaway from Watt’s talk was one that does not always sit well with lawyers—there are limits to what lawyers can do for their client’s case. And when closing the deal, sometimes the law is not enough.