Knowing Where Alumni Land Is Just the Start: Syl Pedota on Relationships and Firm Growth

More firms now see their alumni program as a way to grow the business. After joining a panel on putting alumni data to work at PeoplePath’s New York Alumni Leaders Event, Introhive’s Regional Vice President of Customer Success, Syl Pedota, shares how firms can set the right goals for alumni engagement, partner more closely with lawyers and make the most of AI. She also offers practical first steps alumni and BD leaders can take right away.

Q: You recently joined a panel on putting alumni data to work at PeoplePath’s New York Alumni Leaders Event. What stood out to you, and why does it matter as firms bring in AI?

Syl: The question of who owns alumni isn’t a new one. Programs have swung like a pendulum between HR and marketing for the last 10 or 15 years, and most firms land somewhere in the middle. When PeoplePath polled the room in New York, 58% of alumni leaders said their program sits in marketing or business development, but 29% are still in HR. That’s still a big group.

What’s changing is what firms expect the program to do. Alumni used to be a lovely community with a newsletter. Now firms are realizing their former people are sitting in exactly the seats they want to reach. I often say that when someone leaves your firm, the relationship doesn’t leave with them, but the visibility usually does.

What surprised me most was how much alumni data, in any industry, still depends on people updating their own details. And I get it. I’ve never once updated my alumni status. Never once. (No judgment if you haven’t either.) Most of us simply don’t think to do it. When a list relies on that to stay current, it’s hard to know whether it’s actually usable. My big takeaway from the panel was that alumni engagement only pays off if the data is accurate when someone goes to use it.

That matters even more as firms bring in AI, because AI is only as good as the data behind it, and it spreads mistakes quickly. An agent can draft a hundred alumni outreach emails in a minute, but it doesn’t know who actually knows that alum or that they changed jobs last month. Firms spent this year adopting AI. Next year, leadership will want to see what it delivered. Alumni are a great place to show results, because an introduction, a referral or a rehire is easy to count. AI can point you to the right person, but people still decide whether and how to reach out.

Q: Many alumni teams are focused on getting the foundations right, keeping alumni data current and automating outreach. What does that foundation make possible, and what comes next?

Syl: Clean data is only the starting point. A lot of teams are still working from sheets on sheets on sheets: exporting from one system, comparing against the CRM, and rebuilding event lists by hand. Once you trust the list, you can spend your time using it instead of fixing it.

With that in place, a few things open up. You find the people you didn’t know you had: alumni who never registered for the network, matched from job history and departures. This is one of my favorites, because it hands the program team exactly who to invite. You can also follow alumni past their first move. The real opportunity is the second and third move, when a former associate becomes in-house counsel and then general counsel. And you spot alumni who are already inside your clients and target clients. Often nobody made those connections, because the alumni list lived in HR and the target list lived in BD. And those connections matter more than ever. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals report found that 32% of in-house legal professionals are reconsidering, or ready to reconsider, their relationships with firms that can’t show clear value from AI within a year.

What comes next is connecting alumni data to relationship data. Your data tells you what’s on record. Relationship context tells you who matters, why, and what to do about it. “Jane is now general counsel at Company X” is trivia. “Jane is now general counsel at Company X, she worked on three matters with one of your partners, and they still email every quarter” is a plan. The second version tells you who should make the call. It’s also exactly the context an AI assistant needs to give a reliable answer. Gartner predicts that by 2027, organizations that give their AI data proper context will improve agent accuracy by up to 80% and cut costs by up to 60%.

One gentle caution on AI and automated outreach: they work well for community updates, but the outreach that leads to business comes from someone the alum knows. My advice: automate the admin so your people have more time for real conversations.

Q: Many firms set out to engage alumni on a regular cadence, a touchpoint at three months, then every six months. How does relationship context change the way leaders set engagement goals?

Syl: I’m all for a three-month check-in. A cadence is a good starting point, but relationship context helps you reach out when it actually matters to the person on the other end.

A lot of firms ask their partners to reach out to alumni every three months, but have no real way to tell whether it’s happening or which relationships are starting to cool. The intent is good, but without visibility, it’s a process no one can follow up on.

A regular rhythm still has its place on the community side: events, content and staying top of mind. But a congratulations note the week someone becomes general counsel beats any calendar reminder.

The real opportunities come from what happens in between: a job change, a promotion, an alum landing at one of your clients or target clients, or someone who suddenly becomes very engaged with your events. 

It also matters who reaches out. The same message lands very differently coming from the partner who mentored them than from a generic alumni inbox, and relationship context tells you who that partner is.

Not every alum needs the same approach, either. A general counsel at a top target account and someone who left for a completely different industry are both lovely people, but they call for different engagement plans.

I’d measure success by whether the right person got in touch when it counted, rather than by how many emails went out. Fewer emails, better ones.

Q: What does a great partnership between alumni teams and partners look like? And what are leading firms doing to put alumni relationships to work in business development?

Syl: The strongest partnerships I see are the ones where everyone is clear on their role. The alumni team brings the signal and the context, and the partner brings the relationship and the ask. 

The best alumni teams do the homework for their partners. They don’t send a partner a list of 400 names. They send one alum, one reason it matters right now, who at the firm knows them best, and a suggested next step. One of the best examples from the panel reflects what leading firms are doing: reviewing upcoming pitches each week, checking who the firm knows at each company and which alumni are there, and talking to the people with the strongest relationships. That kind of prep used to take hours of cross-checking lists. Increasingly, the alumni team can ask an AI assistant, “Who are our alumni at these companies, and who knows them best?” and spend their time on the conversations instead.

That means your partner can walk into the pitch fully prepared, knowing, for example, that the firm has four connections in the room and who to lean on. It makes the alumni team look great, and rightly so. Then the partner closes the loop and says what happened, so the win gets counted and celebrated. That last step matters for adoption, because people keep doing what they can see is working. 

Then the partner closes the loop and logs what happened in the CRM, so the win gets counted and celebrated. That last step matters for adoption, because people keep doing what they can see is working.

HR plays a bigger part than many firms realize, because a clean alumni record starts at offboarding. Gallup found that people who have a great exit are six times more likely to come back, yet only 43% of leavers say they were satisfied with how they left. The alumni relationship really starts on someone’s last day.

When it comes to putting alumni to work in BD, here’s what I see leading firms doing:

• They map alumni to top target prospects and key clients, so that every pitch starts with “who do we know there?”
• They build friendly champions inside existing clients. An alum who’s gone in-house is a natural way to build relationships across more of the client.
• They grow referral networks with alumni at firms that can’t do the work themselves.
• They invite alumni who never registered, with outreach from someone those alumni actually remember.

Q: As alumni programs take on a bigger role in growth, how can leaders show the outcomes they’re contributing to?

Syl: Count introductions made, not newsletters sent. If you can connect the program to revenue, referrals and rehires, leadership will pay attention.

Right now, most programs measure the talent side far better than the revenue side. In the New York poll, 76% of alumni leaders said they consistently track rehires and 54% track referrals, but only 39% track alumni-assisted sales. That gap isn’t unique to alumni. Introhive’s 2026 Partner Survey of 120+ partners found that 63% of firms have no revenue-linked way to measure BD return on investment. Alumni programs are a great place to close it, because the outcomes are so concrete.

Here’s how to get there:

1. Tag alumni in the CRM: If you can’t see alumni on an opportunity, you can’t attribute anything to them. It’s not exciting, but nothing else works without it.
2. Set a baseline before you start: Know where you stand today on introductions, referrals and rehires, so you can show the change a year from now.
3. Measure what firm leadership cares about: That means new matters and revenue from alumni-sourced and alumni-influenced work, warm introductions made and how many converted, referrals in from alumni at other firms, and rehires, along with the recruiter fees and onboarding time you didn’t spend.
4. Report quarterly, with a number and a story: The number gets attention, but a story about one coffee that turned into new matter is what people remember.

Be clear about sourced versus influenced. Alumni are often one thread in a bigger relationship. If you take credit for everything, people stop trusting the numbers. If you take credit for nothing, you undersell the program. Pick a definition with finance and stick to it.

PeoplePath’s benchmarking puts alumni at 5 to 20% of revenue for firms that track it, so most programs are sitting on more value than they can currently show. Once partners get timely, accurate alerts about the alumni they know, an alumni program becomes a growth program.

Thank you to PeoplePath for organizing the event and to the alumni leaders who shared their experience.

Introhive gives your firm a clear view of who knows whom, how strong those relationships are, and when it’s the right moment to reach out, all in the tools your  partners and lawyers already use, including the AI assistants they’re increasingly relying on. To learn more, book a demo with our team.