By: Sabrina C. Spitznagle, Principal & Founder at Loop Legal Search
Chicago Legal Recruiters – Your Recruiting Connection
Your resume will be your potential employer’s first impression of you. If it is substandard, your resume likely will be their only impression, as it will land in the reject pile. To end up in the interview pile, make sure your resume is: free from errors and typos; professional, organized, and easy to read; concise (generally no more than one page); accurate and up to date; and aesthetically appealing. The initial reviewer of your resume likely will spend no more than 30 seconds considering it, so it needs to grab his or her attention quickly in a good way. After having reviewed and offered suggestions on thousands of resumes, below are my tips for drafting a resume to give yourself the best possible chance for success.
1. MAKE SURE YOUR RESUME IS FREE OF TYPOS; PROFESSIONAL; ORGANIZED; EASY TO READ; AND CONSISTENT.
Your resume absolutely cannot have typos. Most lawyers will not hire a lawyer who has even a single typo on their resume. Thus, proofread your resume as many times as you possibly can, and then have someone else you trust (a close friend, relative, or good legal recruiter) proofread it for you as well. Do not simply rely on spell check – it won’t catch everything. You don’t want to talk about the pubic companies you have represented when you mean public companies; or the trails you have first-chaired when you mean trials.
Your resume must be professional, organized, and neatly formatted. Your resume (especially in the legal field) is not the place to get super creative. Use a standard, conservative font such as Times New Roman (my personal favorite) and an 11-point font size (or 12 if you have space). Bold and underline your headings, and use bullet points to list and highlight your experience. Don’t use weird formatting or lines and boxes – it always ends up looking sloppy. Give some thought to the format that will convey the necessary information in the most logical way, while still leading with your best assets. For example, if you went to Harvard for law school, you might want to lead with Education before Experience, even if you have been practicing for a fairly long period of time. Similarly, if you are practicing at a top tier law firm, but did not go to such a highly ranked law school, lead with Experience, even if you have not been practicing for very long.
It is much easier to read a resume straight down, rather than having to read from the left, then to the right, and then back to the left again. For this reason, do not place your dates of employment and graduation and city and state of employer and school on the right side of the resume. Use this format instead, which is much cleaner and easier on the eyes:
Law Firm or Company Name, City, State
Title, January 2015 – Present
Be consistent with periods, dashes, spaces, and capitalization. In other words, if you include a period after a bullet point sentence, make sure you have a period at the end of every bullet point. Make sure all of the dashes in your resume are the same size, and if you have a space before and after the dash, make sure to always have a space before and after the dash. Make sure you have the same amount of space after every heading and line, and if one heading is capitalized, make sure all the other similar headings also are capitalized.
2. MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT AND KEEP YOUR RESUME TO ONE PAGE.
To be effective, your resume should be brief and to the point. You need to capture your potential employer’s attention quickly. Ask yourself whether every word on your resume serves the purpose of showing that you are the best person for the position. If not, delete it because resumes almost always should be limited to only one page. You can include a list of representative transactions or matters on an additional page, but keep the main resume to only one page. There are a number of sections that people often include on their resume that are simply a waste of space – especially as a lawyer. For example, don’t include your references or actually write References Available Upon Request on your resume. It goes without saying that you will provide references if a potential employer asks for them. Likewise, don’t include a career objective, summary, or profile – this also is a waste of space, as it should be obvious, and the information likely is duplicative and is more appropriately included in the body of the resume, or perhaps in your cover letter. You also generally can delete Skills and Interests sections, unless they truly relate to the job or are truly unique and interesting (Cooking, traveling, reading, and watching Game of Thrones don’t count as super interesting). Finally, do not waste space by including a photo on your resume. Perhaps it will become the norm in the future, but including a photo on a legal resume is not typical at this time. Also, potential employers can and will google you (so make sure what pops up when someone googles you is appropriate and professional!).
3. USE ACTION VERBS AND APPROPRIATE TENSES.
Use action verbs and do NOT use personal pronouns. The word “I” should not be anywhere on your resume (unless it is your middle initial), and do not ever under any circumstance talk about yourself in the third person. Use the present tense when talking about your current experience, and the past tense when talking about previous positions. For example, if you are a litigator, a bullet point under your current job experience could be, “Draft and argue dispositive, discovery, and class settlement motions in state and federal court, including successfully arguing a motion for summary judgment in a trade secrets case.” If you are a corporate attorney, a bullet point under a past job experience could be something like: “Represented public and private companies and private equity firms in a wide variety of complex business transactions, including large-scale public company mergers, joint venture agreements, middle market M&A deals, and venture capital investments.” Wherever possible, highlight specific achievements and successes using strong action verbs such as analyze, lead, handle, collaborate, negotiate, prepare, draft, coordinate, and manage. At the same time, the main page of your resume should focus on your practical skills, rather than getting into the nitty gritty of specific matters, cases, or transactions you have handled.
4. TAILOR YOUR RESUME TO THE SPECIFIC JOB TO WHICH YOU ARE APPYLING AND USE KEYWORDS FROM THE JOB POSTING.
Tailor your resume to the requirements for any position to which you are applying by using buzz words from the job description (to the extent you have that experience). Thus, you should have several different versions of your resume, depending on the job. For example, if a position description states that they are looking for an attorney with experience representing lenders and borrowers in a variety of complex leveraged finance and asset based lending transactions, including reserve-based lending financing, and you have that experience, make sure to include that at the top of your resume (or as close to the top as is accurate) in more or less those words, with specific examples if possible. But, don’t just copy and paste the job description into your resume – that is too obvious.
5. FEWER JOBS IS BETTER.
Only list your post-law school and summer associate jobs under your Legal Experience heading. Place all judicial internships, legal clinics, and anything you did during and through law school as bullet points under your law school. If you had a job after college but before law school, add an “Other Experience” section, and include it there. Too many jobs under Legal Experience indicates that you move a lot and that makes employers nervous. Thus, minimize the number of jobs under legal experience as much as possible.
6. MAKE SURE YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL IS EMPLOYER READY.
Make sure your personal email is appropriate. If your current personal email is something like hotmama@hotmail.com, a potential employer likely will decide that you do not have the best judgment (even though I think you are totally funny and clever), and you should not include that email address on your resume. Instead, open and use a more official-sounding Gmail account that uses some variation of your last name and law school graduation year (or something like that). And don’t forget that when you email someone from your Gmail account, they can see the picture associated with it. Thus, make sure it is a professional picture of just you that you would want your potential employer to see (don’t use a picture of yourself at a party for example). The same goes for your LinkedIn profile picture and public Facebook page.
7. BE ACCURATE AND HONEST.
You need to be able to talk intelligently and in detail about every single thing on your resume. If anything on your resume is inaccurate or out of date, or if you overstate your experience, that likely will become clear when you are asked about it. It is always significantly worse to be caught in a lie than to have simply told the truth in the first place.