Senior Business Development Executive - International

A leading UK law firm with a network of offices from the South Coast to Scotland, working together as one national team. An innovative practice and the first top 50 law firm to achieve “Platinum Standard” Investors in People, our values and culture are not just words on our website but are the heartbeat of the firm. The lack of barriers between departments, a real lack of hierarchy, zero tolerance for arrogance makes Shoosmiths a fantastic place to work.

The Business Development & Marketing team takes much care of the firm’s external reputation, employing a number of tools to optimise our profile in the market.  Growing profitable income from clients and targets is the key aim of the national Business Development team, and they do this in two main ways, by:

• supporting Relationships (with existing Clients, Targets and Intermediaries)
• developing a strong brand, profile and Reputation for Shoosmiths in the UK market and overseas.

A newly created role within Shoosmiths’ Business Development (BD) team, delivering strategic advisory and co-ordinating tactical support to senior members of Shoosmiths’ International Executive and its strategy to build on the firm’s existing approach to international work. This role presents opportunity to help define and build Shoosmiths’ business development approach / infrastructure for international work.

Through developing a close understanding of, and insight into, the strategic and financial priorities of the International Executive, the role will champion and channel those priorities into the central BD team’s market-facing relationship and reputational activities.

This role facilitates an interface between the International Executive and our central BD functions of relationship management, bids/new business, PR, events/ campaigns, client insight and design and digital. You will work closely with and co-ordinate input from various BD team members to deliver the priorities of this role.

Key to success of the role is proactively building relationships with internal and external stakeholders, principally members of Shoosmiths’ International Executive, Shoosmiths’ Head of Corporate Origination and the BD team.

BD/marketing approach – initial priorities

• Input into the development of the International strategy and approach to targeting and building international work referrals into Shoosmiths via:

1) overseas law firms (whether members of the World Services Group network World Services Group where Shoosmiths is the UK (excluding Scotland) representative or other “best friends” law firms).

2) directly from international corporates / institutions (e.g. PE houses).

• Develop an international BD activity plan with a budget attached.
• Work in collaboration with our Head of Corporate Origination to help directly secure appointments to present Shoosmiths’ international offering.
• Support the tracking of the level, nature, source, etc of international work (inbound to Shoosmiths and outbound from Shoosmiths) to deliver insight, reporting and to inform discussion with work referrers.  
• Support and help organise legal advisers with their international relationship and reputation/profile building activities.
• Audit existing international relationships, identifying those to focus on and identifying touch points drawing from Shoosmiths’ materials / publications / end of year review emails etc.
• Implement internal communications (e.g. intranet pages, firmwide communications) within Shoosmiths to continue to promote awareness of international work messaging / successes.
• Create/curate content for international work on Shoosmiths’ external website, helping write and generate new material to ensure it remains up to date and relevant.

BD/marketing tool kit

• Proactively suggest themes / subject areas for international thought leadership, for example articles / reports / events on emergent legal challenges or trends / new legislation. Work with the Events/Campaigns team and PR team to deliver in the optimum way, e.g. tracking and ensuring follow up from events.
• Develop touchpoint suggestions for the referral firms to send on to their clients.
• Commission relevant market research and analysis (client and competitor intelligence) from the Client and Market Knowledge Team in support of specific new business opportunities or other helpful research / analysis.
• Build and put in place an approach to updating a bank of international experience examples to feed into international deal experience flyers / credentials.
• Develop an awareness and understanding of international work and pipeline to proactively provide ‘pre-prepared’ press release drafts on major deals to assist the central PR team with timely publication.
• Co-ordinate international input from overseas firms for example during proposal processes, in collaboration with lead legal advisers and BD colleagues.
• Provide prompts and direction to the PR team on social media campaigns relating to international work.
• Suggest awards that would be relevant and input in drafting award submissions.
• Obtain social media and Google analytics from the Digital team and provide further analysis/feedback such as to provide improved social media/digital activity.
• Provide content as required for digital lead generation and other campaigns.

Relationships

• Build relationships with the key legal advisers / Partners members of Shoosmiths’ International Executive, agreeing focus areas and priorities.
• Work closely with the Head of Corporate Origination to proactively drive opportunities for international work.
• Build internal network with BD colleagues so as to facilitate co-ordination of their expertise supporting international activities.
• Where possible, establish an international BD network with overseas counterparts dealing with BD in other firms in Shoosmiths’ overseas network.

Experience, qualifications and other role-specific requirements

• Degree educated and CIM qualifications preferred.
• Experience working in an international environment and ideally within a law firm partnership structure or the financial services sector.
• Comfortable working to strict deadlines and in pressurised environments without compromising on quality of work.
• Ability to manage and prioritise own workload, motivated to achieve long term goals.
• Accuracy and attention to detail, and a keen commercial and business sense – able to read a balance sheet and understand the priorities of business.
• Knowledge and application of Microsoft Office suite, Webex / Teams. SAP, InterAction, and Vuture desirable.

Key skills and behaviours

• Proven ability to advise and influence senior stakeholders.
• Interested in and motivated to work in an international context, ideally with experience in an international context, working across time zones.
• BD experience proactively driving development of a product / service offering to generate new business opportunities.
• Languages beyond English would be very helpful.
• Team player, able to work collaboratively within various virtual teams.
• Diplomacy and prioritisation of requests for assistance, to ensure that requests do not exceed the bounds of central BD resource provision.
• Personable yet robust in approach.
• Highly organised, able to run multiple projects concurrently.
• Persuasive and persistent approach to co-ordinating busy stakeholders’ inputs.

Shoosmiths is a committed Equal Opportunities employer promoting equality of opportunity. This means that everyone who either applies to or works for the firm is treated equally, whatever their gender, age, ethnic origin, nationality, marital status, disability, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.