Business Development and Alumni Manager

A leading London law firm (c.1000 people) are recruiting Business Development and Alumni Manager for a newly created role combining practice-group BD with responsibility for developing its alumni programme.

You do not need to have previously run an alumni programme. The strongest fit is likely to be someone with solid legal-sector BD experience who enjoys working with partners, connecting people and turning ideas into practical BD activity.

Around half of the role involves acting as the BD lead for a number of smaller specialist practices, including areas such as Financial Services Regulatory, Employment and Competition.

Rather than simply supporting each practice separately, you’ll help create a more joined-up approach: bringing people together, sharing ideas and market opportunities, identifying links between practices and making sure the groups benefit from the firm’s broader BD activity.

Your practice-group work will include:

• coordinating pitches, client targeting, directories, events and thought leadership;
• identifying opportunities for collaboration and cross-selling;
• bringing practice groups together to share ideas and approaches that are working elsewhere;
• linking specialist teams into wider campaigns and firm initiatives; and
• agreeing priorities with partners and tracking progress.

The other half of the position involves developing the firm’s alumni programme. You’ll build relationships with priority alumni, develop engagement and communications activity, improve the use of alumni data and help build the programme as a source of relationships, introductions, referrals and advocacy.

The ideal candidate will have approximately five years or more of BD experience within legal or professional services, with law-firm experience strongly preferred.

Alumni, membership, network or community-programme experience would be helpful, but it is very much an advantage rather than a prerequisite.