Your alumni are not lost contacts, they are open doors

Several sources have confirmed what many of us are feeling firsthand: lateral moves are happening at a pace our industry has never seen. Every departure can feel like a loss, especially when it involves a lawyer who was well liked, well trained and hard to replace. But here is what many firms overlook. The lawyers who leave firms do not disappear. They move in-house, they move to other firms and they move into positions of real influence. Often, they become your next client, your next referral source or your path into a client you have been trying to reach for years.

It is worth saying plainly. Do not discount departing partners as people who simply did not work out. Some did not, and that is a separate conversation. But most lateral moves today reflect ambition, timing or a better fit elsewhere, not failure. Treating every departure as a loss means missing the relationship on the other side of it.

Consider this. Your firm wants to build a relationship with a company we will call ABC Company. Do you know that their new general counsel, or their new associate general counsel, spent the early years of her career at your firm? If you are not tracking your alumni, and treating them well, you would never even know that door was already open. You would be starting from zero on a relationship that, in reality, started years ago.

Now think about the former partner who left to join another firm. When that firm is conflicted on a matter, who do they think of first? If you have stayed in touch, maintained goodwill and made it easy for them to remember you, the answer could be you. If you have lost touch, or hit them with the door on the way out, the answer is almost certainly someone else.

This is the part of business development that firms consistently underinvest in. We spend enormous energy on new business development and comparatively little on the network we already built and then let walk out the door. That is a mistake, and it is an increasingly avoidable one. Alumni relationships also tend to carry a level of trust that is hard to manufacture with a cold introduction. These are people who already know how your lawyers work, how your firm handles pressure and what it is like to be on the other side of the table with you. That familiarity is worth far more than a polished pitch to someone who has never worked with you before.

I recently spoke with David Chun of Equilar about how alumni tracking technology has evolved, and I was struck by two things. First, how fast the tools have improved in just the last two or three years. Second, how much easier integration with major CRM platforms has become. What used to be a heavy lift, requiring dedicated staff and painstaking manual updates, is now genuinely within reach for firms of any size. You no longer need a large alumni relations department to know where your former lawyers landed, what they are working on and when a relevant opportunity opens up.

That shift matters because it removes the excuse. For years, firms could reasonably say that tracking alumni at scale was too resource intensive to prioritise. That is no longer true. The technology exists, it is affordable and it plugs into systems most firms already use. The barrier now is not capability. It is attention.

A data-driven alumni strategy does not need to be complicated to be effective. It starts with knowing who your alumni are and where they went. It continues with a simple, consistent way of staying in touch, whether that is a dedicated newsletter, an annual event or a CRM workflow that flags key moves and milestones. It ends with a culture that treats departing lawyers as future champions rather than as a subject to avoid. Firms that get this right are not doing anything exotic. They are simply paying attention to a resource that was already theirs. And the exit interview itself matters more than most firms realise. How a lawyer is treated on the way out often determines whether they become an advocate or simply move on quietly. A warm departure, handled with genuine care, is the first step in a long-term alumni relationship.

The lesson is simple. Your former lawyers are not lost contacts. They are potential doors into companies you want to reach, sources of referrals when conflicts arise and, quite often, some of your most credible advocates in the market. Lose track of them and you lose that leverage entirely, often without ever realising what it cost you.

If your firm does not have a data-driven alumni strategy, now is the time to build one. The tools are ready. The opportunity is real. The only question is whether your firm will treat its alumni network as an asset or continue to let it walk out the door unnoticed.