Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast. Today we are sharing our top 10 resume tips. Your Law School Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess, that's me. We're here to demystify the law school and early legal career experience, so you'll be the best law student and lawyer you can be. We're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website CareerDicta. Alison also runs The Girl's Guide to Law School.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review or rating on your favorite listening app. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can reach us via the contact form on LawSchoolToolbox.com, and we'd love to hear from you. And with that, let's get started.
Today, we want to share our top 10 resume tips. So Lee, what is number one?
Ooh, number one is one of my favorites: Make sure your resume doesn't have any typos. Your resume can't have typos. Oh my gosh. Let's just talk about typos generally. I just got some documentation from a lawyer doing legal work, and the documentation had typos in it. And I was like, "Ooh, that does not instill confidence." So the thing is, typos don't instill confidence. They look like you don't take care in your work, and that is a huge problem if you want me to hire you.
Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like right now, now that we have all these AI tools, there's really no excuse for your resume having typos, because you can just give it to Claude or probably ChatGPT just say, "Hey, help me edit this. Do you see any typos?" And it'll tell you.
It will tell you.
It's really, really good at that. Really good at typos.
Yes, it's very good at typos. And then after you do that, it's a good idea to give that resume to some other people and make sure that they don't see anything in it as well. But your resume needs to be perfect, that's just the reality. There's no room for error.
No, there really isn't. I mean, I think it's an unfortunate concept for people sometimes, but it really does need to be your very best work, because this is the foot you're putting forward and saying to someone, "I am presenting my credentials to you and I think you should hire me." And they are going to be pretty nitpicky, because it's a big deal to hire someone.
It is, yeah. And the thing is, when you're especially kind of on the lower end of the hierarchy, what's so important is that other folks are going to represent your work as theirs. That's what it means to be at the bottom of the totem pole. That means that somebody above you is going to take your work and they might drop it in a larger motion, or they're going to edit it and send it to a client. And if they can't have confidence in the quality of your work, that's a fundamental problem for them.
And so, presenting perfect work when you apply for your job is how you show them that they'll be able to utilize your perfect work, hopefully as perfect as possible, in the job. So, super important.
No, absolutely. And I think that leads into number two, which is to make sure that your resume formatting is really clean.
Ugh, seriously. So,
if the margins don't line up, if the tabs don't line up, it just shows you don't have great attention to detail. And you know who are very detail-oriented people in general? Attorneys. We can see the italicized comma, and if the bullet points are different sizes, and we don't even have to really look that hard. At a glance.
At a glance. It's a weird thing, but we're not the only ones. Others can do the exact same thing.
Yeah, I know. I mean, after you've done Law Review, you will never look at a document the same way. Like you said, I can just at a glance be like, "Oh, that comma should not be italicized. That's sloppy." Honestly, I know this sounds crazy - I feel like I can tell when a period is italicized.
I know. I think you can.
I think it's possible. The other one that really bugs me a lot is when somebody right formats the dates, but they don't have them aligned. And this is really tricky. It's actually really hard to get right, which is why I honestly, at this point, despite doing it on my own resume and thinking it looked nice, I really just almost don't encourage people to do it, because you have to get it so perfect and it's really hard to get perfect.
Yeah, it really is. So this is another reason why you want to give your resume to other people and have them look at it. Especially non-lawyers can be helpful, but you want the person who has the highest attention to detail in your life to look for those things. Yeah, it just needs to be clean. Again, if this isn't clean, I'm going to assume your work product's not going to be clean either.
Yeah. And the other thing is once you get it absolutely perfect and everything looks perfect, you save it as a PDF. That's all you do. And you make sure that the PDF comes out the way that you set it up, because sometimes - I know this also sounds crazy - but I have learned that on my MacBook, if I save something one way as a PDF, versus exporting it, versus doing it in your postscript, they come out differently.
They're using slightly different fonts and all of that can mess up your perfect resume. So, you just want to make sure that when it comes out as a PDF - and that's what you're going to send - it is every bit as beautiful as you made it be.
So true. But that does not mean that you need to have pictures. Beautiful just means very clean. Negative space. We'll get to that, but like negative space. It just needs to be clean and perfect. Okay, number three, which I think comes up a lot for folks, especially people who've maybe taken a gap year or spent some time kind of outside of having a typical job, is: You have to explain gaps in your resume.
Because if you don't explain it, then we're going to find it, and we're going to assume that it's something that you didn't feel comfortable explaining, which is not great, right? I mean, listen, nobody's going to judge you caring for a family member for six months, or traveling the world for a year, if you can talk about why you did it and that it was something planned. No problem, right? But if I don't know what that is, then it just looks like you're trying to pull a fast one on me.
And again, I'm not going to hire somebody who's trying to see if I can catch them hiding something.
Yeah, and I think this has to do with a lot of dates. Sometimes people will leave dates off a resume. I think there are ways to finagle dates. You could use a year versus a month. Probably nobody's going to glance that much.
Or like summer, summertime.
Right. "Worked at this job 2017 to 2018." Okay, that probably is not really going to catch my attention, unless you use months everywhere else, at which point I'm going to start thinking, was that December to January? Because that would also be accurate. So, you want to think about how you're presenting this stuff. And if you do have things that maybe you left a job in a couple of months, there may be ways to explain that. Maybe, again, there you don't have to be so specific.
There might be ways to kind of just finesse it a little bit. But if you get it too much into finessing, people start to have questions, and if you have questions looking at someone's resume, it's usually not somebody you're going to reach back out to.
Yeah. And cover letters can be a great place to kind of share your narrative, if there are things that kind of need to be explained. You don't feel like you have to explain everything. Like if you had a personal health crisis, I don't think you need to share everything in your cover letter.
But if you're sharing your narrative and there is some space there, I think just giving the recruiter or whoever's reviewing your resume some sort of explanation so they don't feel like they're just going to have to come to you and say, "A year is missing from your resume. What was that about?" That's the conversation you don't want to have.
Yeah, I remember my co-clerk asking the judge that we worked for towards the end of our clerkship, "So, you used to be a law firm partner. If you saw that somebody had taken a little bit of time after their clerkship to become a ski bum, would you still hire that person?" And he kind of looks at her and says, "Well, I would definitely want to have extra time to talk with them." So in the end, she did not decide to become a ski bum that winter.
But he's like, "You know, it wouldn't be disqualifying, but I would want to understand your motivations."
Yeah. And I think that if presented the right way, you could talk about what you could learn by being a ski bum, or maybe you're teaching skiing, and a lot of valuable lessons can come from that. There are things that you could do to finesse your experience. I remember one of my friends in law school had worked seasonally at Nordstrom since she was in college. That was one of her gigs.
And almost every law firm interview loved to talk to her about that, because it's customer service work and they loved it. They would always talk about that and the fact that she kept getting rehired seasonally, over and over again, they took as a really great sign. So, it's not trying to hide your story; it's about trying to make your story work for you.
This is your authentic story and your narrative, and it's all about your elevator pitch and why all of your experiences make you a great candidate. If you're trying to hide something, then I think it comes out that you are what you're hiding. And that's just not true. Life is more complicated than that.
Yeah. And if you can't stand behind the choices you've made, you've got to find a way to come to peace with them, because otherwise you're not going to be able to present this in a way that makes sense. And yeah, customer service work is great. I've worked other places where they always looked for someone being a barista or a waitress or something in college, because you know how to interact with people. That's what we're looking for.
Yeah. And angry people usually, which is part of it.
Very true. Very true.
Well, linked to this idea is number four, which is that your LinkedIn profile needs to match your resume. This should be not a shocker for everyone, but I think most of the time now people look at your LinkedIn profile, just as long or sitting next to your resume, and if they don't match or they misrepresent things that you've said in one or the other, that's a huge red flag.
For me personally, if I see that stuff is on your LinkedIn that you've left off, that seems like it should be on your resume, that doesn't sit well with me. If stuff is missing, that doesn't sit well with me.
Well, and also this can complicate the date thing, because LinkedIn usually does want a specific date and month. So if you have 2017, 2018 on your resume and you have December 2017 to January 2018 on LinkedIn - that's going to probably raise a few questions. Yeah.
So, you definitely want to make sure that those two match. And again, whatever your story is, own it, but make sure it's a very clean story.
And honestly, in a situation like that, if you've literally worked someplace two months, I might just consider dropping it everywhere. Nobody's going to notice a couple of months gap on LinkedIn or on your resume, but I probably will notice if you've left in two months and then try to make it look like two years.
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Alright, tip number five is to make sure your resume is tailored to the job that you're applying for. We get this all the time, that people just drop their legal resumes to work for us and we work in education, legal education.
Yeah. They're not exactly the same thing.
No. So you definitely want to tailor it. Alison, what does it mean, though, to tailor a resume?
Well, I had this conversation a lot with my roommate in law school, when she was first applying for jobs, because her background, she'd come out of computer science, she had a corporate job, but she really wanted to be in public interest. And so, that's a situation where it's not that we're taking things off necessarily, but we might want to emphasize different things.
We might want to play up the non-profit experience that you had, or the volunteer work that you did over something that just looks really corporate, because that's a hard shift to make. So if you're applying for public interest jobs, it needs to really look like a public interest type of resume. Same thing if you're applying for the government. These days, I don't know, but maybe people still want to work for the government. Anyway, same thing if you're applying for a corporate role.
You're working at a BigLaw firm and your background is all about how you have been in public interest - again, you need to shape that to emphasize different things. That'll at least give you something to talk about and make it plausible that you might actually want this job.
Yeah. And you can even highlight in your job description, the skills that you were building in that position that will apply to whatever you're doing. Let's just use teaching, right? You want to go into academia, you want to go into teaching. Well, being a law firm partner or mentoring newer lawyers - that's great, I would love to see that. That may not be on your regular resume, but you should add that in as one of your roles. So it's really just about also saying what skills you have.
Like, if you want to go work in non-profit work and in legal aid, and you come from a more traditional law firm environment - did you do client-facing work? Did you do intake interviews? Did you do pro bono work? I mean, there's a lot that you can do, but you're going to want to highlight that. I also think that it again goes back to presenting yourself.
If you present this resume that highlights all of that and someone can tell that it is a public interest resume or a teaching resume or whatever it might be - that shows effort and that you're really invested in it. If you just drop me a resume that just happens to be the CV that you updated last, that shows me that you're not really trying that hard to get a job with me.
Right. And I think it's hard because oftentimes people might need to apply to a lot of jobs, but you still want to try to make every one of them feel special and feel like you really want that particular job. It's really obvious, typically, if somebody has just scattershotted out hundreds of resumes, hoping one of them might come back. But really, you're probably going to get better results if you actually have something that's more targeted to that specific role.
Yeah. Well, all this discussion of what to include leads us to tip number six, which is to think about what information you don't include. We've mentioned this a little bit. Is that two-month job worth including? But, again, if you don't include things, then I assume they don't exist, usually. So, if you don't include academic honors or Law Review, I assume that you don't have any academic honors or run Law Review.
If you don't include a GPA or a general ranking, oftentimes I assume that's not something that's going to bolster your resume in the beginning of your career.
To be fair, not every school actually lets you put that. We were literally, at Columbia, not allowed to calculate a GPA and not allowed to put about it. There were no class ranks. Everyone was above average, of course. It was very Lake Wobegon. But if your school permits it, or if you have a generally relatively impressive class ranking and they let you put it on there - yeah, these are the things that should be on there. If you were on a journal, it should be there.
Yeah, like a Law Review or a moot court.
I would say moot court, yeah.
Did you do competitions? Anything that kind of sets you apart.
I would say if you weren't on any type of journal, there needs to be something else, ideally, that's making up for that. So, it needs to be a serious time investment in moot court or whatever it was that you spent your time doing. Hopefully there was something. Maybe you were doing a lot of pro bono work. There just needs to be something where we can look and say, "Oh, okay, maybe this person wasn't on a journal, but they were doing this other thing that was equally valid."
There needs to be just something. Show me what makes your law school experience unique, especially if you aren't going to put included GPA. Even if your school allows you to do it, if it is not something that is your greatest asset and you decide to leave it off, then I think you need to say what else makes you impressive. So, awards or competitions or clinics or anything that sets you apart, journals.
Even if it's not the Law Review, if it's a different type of journal, that's still super valuable experience. But silence in this area also says something.
Yeah. I mean, if you wrote a note, that can go on there. Anything that's there. Sometimes we just see, "X Law Review, graduated this date", moving on. Did you just spend three years doing nothing? Surely you did something.
Right, yeah. Were you in leadership of the Student Bar Association? Anything. Give me something. something.
Did you lead a club, or even in clubs? I mean, worst case, join some clubs, put them down, try to get a leadership role. You can be vice president of any club you want,
basically. Exactly, exactly. So, just include something, because also that gives the interviewer something to ask you about in the interview, and that's very helpful as well. You don't want to get the question of, "What did you do in law school?"
Right. Or undergrad as well. Hopefully you were involved in something in undergrad. And if you weren't, because you were doing something else, like caring for a family member, working a lot - put that on the resume.
Yeah, exactly. Alright, that leads us to number seven, which is: Never overestimate your experience, because you might be found out.
Yeah, s. For example, if you were not on a journal, do not put that you were on that journal. If you did not participate in X moot court competition, do not put that on the resume. I feel like this should be pretty obvious, but people like to cross that line sometimes of finessing things to just making them up.
I also think that this can get a little tricky when you talk about non-licensed legal work. So, when you are describing your legal work as a law student or a clerk, make sure that you aren't describing it as being a lawyer. You do not give legal advice. It is unethical and an unauthorized practice of law if you give legal advice without being a lawyer. Make sure it doesn't sound like that. Make sure that what you are describing as your role is actually your role.
If you're a clerk and you appeared in court, that's okay, because you were granted the permission to do so. I did that, that's okay. But you did it under the supervision of a lawyer. Just make sure that whatever you're describing is not accidentally sounding like you were doing the unauthorized practice of the law.
Right, yeah. And I think this one's tricky in the resume world, because everyone's like, "Make it sound like it's your work." Well, did you work on that brief or did you...
You didn't file that brief, because you don't have a license.
You might've drafted it. There were cases where I drafted things at law firms, but I didn't file it under my name.
No, you might have contributed to things.
Right. I think that's a good line to think about, is not taking too much credit, but taking enough credit. And if somebody asked me, "Did you draft that brief?", I would say "yes", and I could talk about that. And somebody else obviously approved it and signed off on it, but literally, I drafted it.
Right, I think that's fine. I think you just want to be aware of what the role is, and don't overstate what you're doing.
It gets comical sometimes, where you're like, "Okay, wait, so you were a 1L and you did all these things that a partner would typically be doing? I don't think so."
Yeah. And again, if you're the supervisor who is interviewing someone who looks like they somewhat inflate their work, then you typically don't want that person working for you.
Right, no. I mean, you just want to be straightforward and be able to support the things that are on your resume.
Exactly. Alright, now let's swing back for number 8 to a little bit more about how it
Please don't use colors or make the formatting distracting. I personally love the color purple. I nice lavender, it's great. Not on paper. I do not like lavender on a resume. I do not enjoy it. I'm sorry, I really don't.
Not on a legal resume.
Not on a legal resume.
If you are applying to be a dance instructor or something,
cool. Or designer. Graphics designer? Maybe.
Maybe. Even then, probably not, but definitely not on a legal resume. No.
Black and white. Yeah.
Black and white, standard fonts. Use Judicious bold, maybe some italics, maybe a few underlines, but that's it. Don't get creative on this.
I don't think that's how your resume stands out in a good way. I think it stands out in a very negative way.
Definitely not. It shouldn't be distracting. Sometimes people get really elaborate, with a lot of columns and things. Okay, I can see that working. I've seen good resumes that have multiple columns. Most of them do not work well in that format. You just want it to be very easy to read, and clean and easy to follow, because people are looking at this quickly, they're processing it quickly. They might be looking at it on a screen, so you want to review it on a screen.
If I'm on my iPhone and you've got two columns - come on, there's no way I can read that.
Yeah, it's so true. So, this is a great thing to think about too. You can take your resume in its PDF form, you can even print it out, and maybe take it a generation or two above yourself. Because I think that sometimes what is kind of normalized in your peer group may not be normalized in the peer group of the folks that will likely be looking at those resumes. I think that's another thing.
It's like, maybe go to a mentor, go to a trusted parent or family friend who is the population that's going to be looking at the resume, and make sure it meets those norms. Right. And this is something that ideally your career services can always help you with, we can help you with if you need another eye on your resume. But yeah, I think that's a great point. Generally, if you're in your 20s, that's not necessarily who's the hiring person on this. So, you've got to play to your audience.
Yeah. Okay, this one - tip number nine - came from the recruiter on our team. So this is one of her least favorite things, is: Make sure you mix up the verbs you use in the bullets. So if you have a list of bullet points, you don't want all of them to start with the same word - which, you might be listening to this and saying, "Well, sure", but it's actually kind of hard when a lot of your roles do the same exact work.
Right. And you can only do so much research, but you've got to get the thesaurus out on this. What's a similar word to "researched"? "Compiled". Yeah, anytime you're using a word multiple times, whether it's a verb or some other word - sometimes people just have their favorite words I think you've got to try to mix it up because it does start to look kind of repetitive and just a little lazy.
Yeah. You definitely want to take a fresh eye to it and say, "If I use 'researched' five times, that's probably not great." Even if it's in a sentence, mix up the sentence.
You can't just have it every bullet point being like, "I did this, I did this, I did this, I did this", and they're all the same thing. You probably did more than one thing.
Yeah, exactly. So, give it a little spice, a little variety.
Research could then become "assisted partner with research on".
Collaborated. "Collaborated with".
Right, exactly. These are all taking the right amount of credit, and also not just sounding super repetitive.
Right. "Initiated research." I mean, there are lots of things that you can do.
"Compiled data" is more specific than "research". Be
It's
specific about what you did.
Yeah. Because again, if it sounds more interesting, somebody's likely to ask you about it. If you compiled data, then you would say, "Oh, that's interesting. Tell me more about that." A lot of people hate data.
"Oh, you can use numbers. Did you use a spreadsheet?" Lawyers are afraid of spreadsheets. So that's great. That's like a whole skillset.
It's true. Yeah, you can lean into that sort of stuff. Alright, to round out, number 10 is: Go ahead and include an "Interest" section, but be specific. So I feel like if you have interesting interests, include them. And if you don't, don't.
Right. But come up with something. And this was something I'd really never seen on a resume until I got to the legal world. I was like, wait, I'm supposed to put I like yoga and baking. Like, what? But even then, "baking" - not so great. "Baking sourdough bread" - that's a good interest. I had a friend who put "cheese" on her resume, and she did it because she wanted to talk about her interest in cheese rather than what happened in Tort class.
But I do think this is one where you want to make it as specific as possible. Like, "reading" is not a great interest on a resume. "Reading historical fiction" that's fantastic. Yeah.
I would say even with travel. "Travel" isn't great, but what if you do adventure travel or you're hiking all the seven peaks? I don't know. I just have a friend who just did Base Camp Everest. I think you should put that on a resume, because that's super fascinating. If you're somebody who goes and hikes big mountains, that's super cool.
Or like "Traveled to X, Y, and Z", unless it is like Cancun, to sit beach.
That's true.
But once you get an interview, these are the things that people are often going to talk to you about, because we don't want to talk about what your favorite law school class is either. I might ask you the question briefly, but I really don't care. But if you tell me that you are interested in reading historical fiction, I'm going to be like, "Oh, what kind of books have you read recently? Who have you been reading about?
What have you been learning?" And the answer shouldn't be, "Oh, I can't think of anyone."
Right. If it's on there, you better have something prepped to talk about.
Yeah. I wanted to ask someone who put "baking" on his resume because, as I said, I'm into baking. This is great, we'll have something to talk about. I said, "What do you like to bake?" And he kind of looked at me blankly and I'm like, "It's on your resume." And he says, "Oh well, it'd probably be more accurate to say I like to watch baking shows." I'm like, that was a softball question, and that a terrible answer.
If you'd put "watching baking shows" on your resume, I would have been totally down with that. I'll talk to you about the Great British Baking Show all day.
All day. I would love that. That would make very fun interview.
But if you put "baking", you better have something you bake. Come on. This is not hard.
No. I would not put "baking", because I'm terrible baker and I don't do it for fun. Nobody wants me to put that on a resume.
Yeah. But I can definitely do a 30-minute interview on the details of sourdough baking. Not a problem. I could talk about that for hours.
Yeah, exactly. Or even crafting the perfect coffee, which you have also spent a lot of time recently
on. But even that, I wouldn't feel totally confident right now putting that on my resume. But if you want to talk to me about how I grind my own flour for the sourdough, we can go there.
Exactly. I once did an interview with someone who had been on a pilot of a reality TV show, and that was on the resume. And I had to ask about that. And afterwards, I asked her if everyone asked her about that. And she said "no". And I'm like, how do you not ask about someone being on a pilot of a reality TV show? That's super fascinating.
Right, and that's a total lawyer thing too, because someone I worked with, actually, she and her brother won The Amazing Race.
Oh my gosh. I love The Amazing Race.
Yeah, I worked with one of the winners. Never watched the show. But yeah, she quit shortly thereafter.
Oh well, they did get a nice little chunk of money from
it. Exactly. So you never know. People might think, "Oh, it's so weird. If I've been on the pilot of reality show, I'd never put that on my resume." But that's actually great to put on it, because it's something interesting.
It's something interesting, people want to talk about something interesting. I did a lot of performing in my younger days. I did opera, I did musicals, I was in a cappella. And I used to put that stuff on resumes. I did community theater. People love to talk about that stuff. And you never know what skills you can highlight, right? Performing is actually a really great thing to include on a resume if you want to be a litigator and need to basically perform as part of your job.
That is what you do. You dress up in a suit and you perform in the courtroom or in front of clients. That's basically what you do. So you may say, "Why would community theater be something interesting?" But somebody may want to talk about it because it shows that you could show up, you could rehearse, you're diligent, and you don't get stage fright and you're likely able to perform under pressure.
Yeah, exactly. It's all about that person is confident, they have put themselves out there. Those are perfect things that attorneys are looking for. So, think about your background, mine it for something. Even if you're like, "I'm so boring, all I like to do is read." You know what a lot of attorneys do? Read stuff.
Yeah, they read stuff.
It doesn't have to be like, "Oh, I'm so extroverted and interesting." It's just, again, reading historical fiction, you'd be great appellate lawyer, probably.
Yeah, it's so true. A lot of great lawyers are a little nerdy, and spend a lot of time reading and working on projects. And that's okay, we're all the same. Yeah. So,
just put those nerdy interests on your resume and just go with them.
Yeah. Alright, well, as we finish up, do you have any final thoughts for folks as they put together their resumes?
I would say my number one is just get other people's feedback on it and really listen to it, because if they're telling you something is confusing or they don't understand it or, God forbid, there's a mistake - just listen and fix it.
Yeah, I think that's great. I think the only thing I would add is, just be your authentic self. I think a lot of times there's this pressure to make yourself out to be somebody that you aren't. And that comes through in an interview. If you get an interview based on a resume that's not really a true reflection of yourself, just like the guy who didn't bake, it's going come out. And most of us, if we weave our stories, are interesting people.
And you have done something interesting, or there's something interesting about yourself. And so, part of this is just really sitting and saying, "What is my story? What is my narrative? What is my elevator pitch, and how do I want to represent that?" But you have something that makes you a unique candidate. Just don't bury it, thinking that it's uninteresting or inappropriate.
Totally agree.
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