Alumna Charts Career with Confidence and Bold Moves

Meet Kim Bero Rennick ’96 

Being a successful litigator wasn’t a big enough challenge for Kim Bero Rennick ʼ96. Though she achieved it with a purposeful plan, her role as a corporate lawyer left her wanting more. So she changed the course of her life. Today, Rennick is chief marketing and business development officer of the Americas for Allen & Overy, one of the world’s leading law firms. And through giving back to Saint Mary’s College, she’s changing the lives of future students.

After completing a degree in communication studies at Saint Mary’s, Rennick graduated from law school at the University of Notre Dame, and secured a position with a law firm in Scottsdale, Arizona. Each milestone was a part of her plan.

What came next wasn’t as planned. Three years into her law career, “on a whim” she applied for a sales position with Thomson Reuters, providing law firm customers legal, regulatory and business information and analytics. She wanted more control of her time and knew she had the confidence and experience for sales, she says.

“I was good at practicing law,” said Rennick, adding that being an attorney was a lot like writing term papers for a living, which is one of the strengths she credits to her Saint Mary’s education. “But I didn’t love it,” she said.

Just as Saint Mary’s prepared her for expertise in writing briefs, its liberal arts curriculum also prepared her for success in sales. Through finding her voice, required class participation, and many presentations, Saint Mary’s gave Rennick practice at delivering persuasive proposals.

She got the job. But more than a slight career shift, it re-routed her entire professional path, and it was life changing.

Rennick said it was early on in the process that she faced the proverbial fork in the road. Regional managers she interviewed with were lawyers by training and business people by choice. 

“I was struck by these stunningly articulate and enthusiastic managers. This wasn’t a fall-back career for them—they were lawyers who chose to be salespeople. They crafted their own paths in the legal profession. It was intoxicating,” she remembers. 

After various national sales roles in the DC area, Rennick became a full-time student again and earned an MBA in law firm management at George Washington University. Her 2011 personal business plan included achieving an executive role in a large law firm in a 10-year period, not as any attorney, but as a business manager.

She took a sales position within one of her clients’ law firms—a position that was rare—where she honed her business development skills. In 2017 the top-ranked firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon offered Rennick the chief business development and marketing officer seat. 

Four years ahead of her goal, Rennick made it to the C-suite.

Her hard work in that first executive role launched her to the seventh largest law firm in the world. In 2020 Rennick accepted her current position with the UK-based firm, Allen & Overy, where she defines and leads the US strategy for business development and the entire marketing communications efforts. At every step, where there wasn’t a path, she created one. 

Exceedingly humble, Rennick says of her latest success, “Ramping up at a global powerhouse firm is a different animal entirely. The level of precision that is required makes me realize I still have a lot to learn.”

As a student, she didn’t know how much of a sense of belonging she would find at Saint Mary’s. It turned out to be as deep as it is enduring. 

“There’s not a single day in my life that I don’t think about Saint Mary’s College,” she said. “Whether it’s a friend, or something I learned, it’s a big part of my memory and my mind.” 

That connection naturally led to giving to the College. “When something really impacts my life, I want to stay connected to it and give back,” she said. At each of her professional milestones, Rennick had donated to scholarship funds and to financial aid. Today, she has expanded her reach to support students through a generous multi-year commitment to the Annual Scholarship Program through the Saint Mary’s Fund. “It wasn’t much of a thought. When I had money of my own, I began giving what I could,” she said.

Raised in a family with a service mindset, she says she was taught that it is “absolutely incumbent upon you to pay it back every way you can.” Last fall Rennick shared her time and advice with Saint Mary’s students while on campus as the fall Shannon Executive Scholar recipient. The program—established by a gift from Professor William N. Shannon and his wife, Bonnie—brings together alumnae and the campus and local community to make connections and share experiences. She has always lived by the wisdom she imparted during that visit: “Play the long game. Whatever ‘it’ is, working hard at it consistently and showing up consistently can net incredible results.”

Surrounded by other highly educated professionals with children who have many resources available to them, Rennick says she realizes now, as an adult and mother of two daughters, what she didn’t have as a first-generation college student. Her parents provided abundant love and monetary support for tuition, but they didn’t have their own experience of higher education to give her specific guidance about college life.

She had to learn to navigate undergraduate and postgraduate degrees on her own. Ultimately, her ability to figure things out was the resource she needed most to create her own professional path.

“Demographically speaking, I’m not supposed to be sitting here right now,” she said. “It was the grace of God, my parents who love me and me figuring it out on my own. And that makes me realize that Saint Mary’s was exactly where I should have been.”