The Legal Resume

Your résumé is a personal marketing/promotional piece that answers a prospective employer’s question: “What can you do for me?” The left-side menus are designed to walk you through all parts of a legal résumé. Before submitting a résumé and cover letter to any employer, students should have them reviewed by a CPDO counselor. Legal résumés can be very different from those in other industries. CPDO counselors speak with hiring attorneys to know exactly what employers do and do not like to see on a legal résumé.

Resume Template

When drafting a résumé, consider:

• Potential employers will formulate their first impression of you while reviewing your résumé. Thus, you want to make your résumé a true reflection of your skills, interests, abilities, accomplishments, and even your personality.
• A legal résumé varies in format and content from other types of résumés; therefore, it is probably necessary to revise your current résumé. For example, note that the standard legal résumé does not contain an objective statement nor does it contain the standard line “references available upon request.” Use the resume template to construct your legal resume.
• Be concise. When employers review résumés, they will usually scan them first. Consequently, your résumé should be scanable. Instead of writing in sentences and paragraphs, use phrases; be concise. Through the judicious use of spacing, bolding, capitalizing, and underlining, you can exercise a great deal of control over the initial thirty-second scan that your résumé receives by emphasizing items that enhance your candidacy.
• Employers looking for legal talent expect clarity, neatness and evidence of strong communication skills. If your résumé is poorly designed, badly copied, difficult to scan, hard to understand or contains a typographical error or grammatical error, you will give the employer an excuse to assume you would also not live up to his or her expectations of you on the job.