How to Craft a Law School Resume:
This article is brought to you by Anika Nayyar. She is one of our PracticePro Diversity Scholars and has come up with the following tips to help you craft your resume:
Not too long ago, I was in your shoes, as an eager 1L trying to perform the difficult balancing act of navigating how to achieve academic success and find the perfect summer job to kickstart my legal career. I understand that working on your resume during your busy 1L schedule may prove to be challenging and daunting, but it is absolutely integral to success in your 1L and 2L job search.
It is important to reach out to your CDO for guidance and not to get discouraged if it takes multiple iterations to perfect your resume. After working as a professional in the corporate world for two years prior to law school, it took me at least two to three iterations to revise and customize my resume with the substance and format most suitable and appealing to legal employers. Based on my experience, I am sharing the following tips for crafting a strong resume:
Do:
1. Limit the length of your resume to a single page.
Given that prospective employers often have limited time and numerous resumes to review, it is important to choose a format and font that is readable and highlights your relevant skills and experience. A single well-organized page with clearly labeled headers enables the employer to parse out specific qualities that set you apart and make you a perfect fit for the proposed role. Academic qualifications should be placed at the top, followed by your professional experience in reverse chronological order. In your academic qualifications section, be sure to include any notable activities or achievements outside of the classroom such as Moot Court, Law Review, Journal, and Affinity Group participation.
2. Limit each professional and academic experience summary to no more than 3 bullet points.
While it may be tempting to list out every task that you have performed in your professional and academic experience, it is essential to condense these tasks into succinct sentences that effectively showcase the work you performed and the skills you gained. Short and powerful one-line phrases describing your functional role grab the reviewer’s interest and enable them to determine the value your experience provides to the proposed role. For prior non-legal professional experiences, it is pivotal to highlight how the skills you have gained from those experiences are transferable to the legal field.
3. Use active voice when describing the tasks you completed within each job experience.
Using active voice in your resume whenever possible demonstrates the strength of your writing ability and your willingness to provide concrete and informative details about the tasks you have completed in previous professional experiences. Examples of helpful active verbs to utilize on your resume include conducted, developed, coordinated, organized, prepared, compiled, and served.
4. Include a brief interests or hobbies section at the bottom of your resume.
Outlining your unique interests and hobbies outside of the workplace provides an easy way to distinguish yourself from other prospective candidates. Your unique hobbies and interests give insight into your personal attributes and often serve as intriguing conversation topics during the interview process that employers remember you by. An employer may ask you about one of your listed hobbies, which can make an interview more conversational. However, be prepared to answer questions about your interests.
Don’t:
1. Don’t forget to proofread and revise your resume multiple times before submission.
Resumes provide prospective employers a first impression of your skill set and corresponding work ethic. Making minor clerical or spelling errors prove to be costly as they create an impression of laziness and instantly diminish your credibility. The legal field is a client service profession, so accuracy is a priority. Hence, it is critical to have your resume self and peer-reviewed multiple times for spelling and grammatical errors.
2. Don’t include inaccurate or false information about your credentials or experience.
Although a resume serves as a document that articulates your educational and professional accolades, it is crucial to ensure that every piece of information it contains is accurate. Any false or misleading information places your reputation with the prospective employers in the legal community at significant risk.
3. Don’t articulate your professional and academic experiences in the first person or in the incorrect tense.
When reviewing your resume, remove any references to “I” or “we.” All descriptions of professional and academic experiences should be written in the third person using the tense aligned with the time frame the experience occurred in. For example, past tense should be used for prior experiences and present tense should be used for current ongoing experiences.
4. Don’t include irrelevant, old, or unprofessional experiences.
Given the limited space available on your resume, it is important to highlight your significant professional and academic experiences and remove any irrelevant or old experiences. As a rule of thumb, no experiences from before your undergraduate degree should be included unless they hold special significance to the work you would be performing in the legal field. In addition, it is absolutely essential to remove any unprofessional experiences or characteristics from your resume, as they may cause a prospective employer to question your work ethic, loyalty, and ability to work well with others.
Anika Nayyar's Bio:
Anika Nayyar is 2L at University of California Davis School of Law, who is primarily interested in corporate transactional legal practice. This past summer, Anika worked as an in-house Legal Intern with Juniper Networks, where she conducted a 10Q risk factor benchmarking analysis, researched SEC guidelines on no action letters, and created a security measures playbook for contract language compliant with GDPR. Prior to law school, Anika worked as a Management Consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers where she advised high technology clients on vendor offshoring deals by conducting vendor performance evaluations and cost benefit analysis of vendor proposals, facilitating contract negotiation, and developing implementation strategies, communication plans, and governance models. Anika’s hobbies outside of the legal field include hiking, dancing, yoga, basketball, and soccer. Next summer, Anika will be working as a Summer Associate at Orrick, Herrington, and Sutcliffe’s San Francisco office.