While we normally don’t really report news on law firm business development (BD), this one’s quite interesting: Trilegal has hired the former Baker & McKenzie Hong Kong office BD and marketing director Anand Ramaswamy in Delhi, reported India Business Law Journal.
He had been at Bakers for 13 years until June 2017, after time since 1996 at Hogan Lovells, Allen & Overy and Chadbourne & Parke.
Most interestingly, he had started his legal career from 1993 to 1995 as a corporate legal assistant at the ill-fated India office of US law firm Chadbourne & Parke LLP (of Lawyers Collective Bombay high court writ petition-fame), according to his Linked-in profile, before moving to Hong Kong with the firm in 1996 as a paralegal. He entered business development for banking and finance at Allen & Overy in Hong Kong in 1997.
Ramaswamy is a 1991 commerce bachelor graduate in economics, management and business from ARSD, of the University of Delhi.
Trilegal co-founding partner Karan Singh told IBLJ that thiw as a new role to “focus our efforts on client development and retention as well as developing specific initiatives across growth markets and sectors”.
Ramaswamy would “assist the firm achieve greater organisational efficiency through process alignment and client-focused service delivery”.
Also, slightly cryptically and ominously, according to IBLJ:
Trilegal had been without a business development head since the departure of Krishnakoli Dutta, who was director strategy and outreach, in July 2016. A marketing professional who did not wish to be named described business development at Trilegal as a “high pressure job” and that the firm is one of very few in India where business development is taken seriously. “Everywhere else BD [business development] is visibility focused and has little to do with the hard work that goes into researching the market and potential clients.”
Comments
Immense value add can be brought. Law firms need to put their might & money behind such professionals.
And even when there are, they are very different from firm to firm: at some they are more in the PR field, at others they are in the strategic client acquisition space, in others yet they are a senior associate who's also wearing a BD hat.
If we're looking at BD as primarily PR, I don't see the PR function of most corporates talked about much if at all in the mainstream media either (unless we are talking about government spokespersons). I believe that's probably in part because a PR function is intended to often act nearly invisibly (I don't want to say 'in the shadows') because it is expected to be acting on behalf of its client (i.e., the corporate or law firm partnership), rather than encouraging stories about the PR function itself (which could also lead to a theoretical conflicts if a PR is at the same time pitching a story for a client as well as a story about themselves?).
Still, happy to reconsider and evaluate this on a case by case basis next time we hear about a BD hire or move... :)
It's probably no coincidence that a lot of the younger and smaller firms that are doing well, such as the Trilegals and S&Rs, tend to work rather hard...
[img]https://media0.giphy.com/media/3oKIPn5Lc3oRd3kIBG/200.gif[/img]
Those folks barely manage to survive.
I would like to also apply for a job. Any help????????
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River Government