Attorney Resume Review Workshop for Lawyers: Common Resume Mistakes, Resume Examples, and How to Get More Interviews

The webinar also walks through real resume examples and shows how small changes can make a major difference. I discuss why resumes should usually be one page, why summaries and filler language often hurt more than help, and why attorneys should avoid listing anything that makes them look average, distracted, or not fully committed to practicing law. A major theme is that law firms are businesses looking for specialists who can make money and add value, so resumes need to be written with that reality in mind. Overall, this webinar is about teaching attorneys how to strip away what weakens their presentation and build resumes that make them look focused, marketable, and hireable.
 

Introduction

So we're gonna get started with this webinar. This is in my opinion, probably could be the most important webinar. If you watch this and take real good notes, I think this can help you in a major way. And most attorneys do not take the time to learn this or law students for that matter.

And because of that don't get probably 90% of the positions that they're applying to that they could if they made that the changes in things that I'm gonna talk to you about today.


What I'm gonna be covering today are really about everything that I've learned in 25 years of doing this, I've reviewed over 700,000 resumes. So every resume that comes into BCGI look at and I have to make decisions fairly quickly about whether or not that person is marketable because I have to give them to a recruiter.

And that takes the recruiters a lot of time to work on. And so I want people to be able to place people for our company. And so this is kind of everything that I've learned. Now, I will tell you that what I'm talking about, it has nothing to do with having been to a top law school, how you did there or even and to some extent even the positions that you may have had in the past.

So what you're gonna learn today is how to structure your resume in the correct way. And I'm gonna tell you everything that I've learned and before I learned a lot of what I'm, I've learned right now when I was myself applying for jobs. Now I've learned 10 times what I've learned now, but I was able to get incredible number of jobs.

And one of the main ways I did that was by just stripping down my resume and making it very basic with hardly any information on there. And I'll talk to you today about how you do that and how anyone you can get many more times jobs, probably 10 times, if not more. If you learn what I'm gonna talk to you about, and I'll review lots of resumes today, but I did wanna go over a few things before we start so you can have a pretty good understanding of these rules.
 

How Employers Actually Read Resumes

And then we'll learn a lot when we start looking at people's resumes. But the general rule is for an employers will get lots of resumes. They will often get hundreds of resumes for a job. Sometimes they won't get that many. Sometimes they'll only, they won't get many at all depending on where they, where the firm is geographically.

But in most cases they're gonna get quite a few resumes. And so when they get a resume, they don't spend a lot of time looking at it. They spend maybe 10 seconds, maybe 20 seconds. I will often spend a little bit more time than that because I'm looking for things with practice areas and other things that wouldn't necessarily concern the average employer.

But at the same time people don't spend a lot of time in your resume. They spend no more than 10, 20, maybe 30 seconds at most. But most of the time they don't spend much time at all. And the reason is because what they're essentially doing is they're looking at your resume and they're saying, does this look like a resume for the position that we currently have?

And that's it. Or is it some, does this look like someone that would fit in with the type of work that our company does? And so if you have a bunch of different things on your resume that don't have anything to do with what that is, or don't make you look like a really strong candidate for that job, then they're just not gonna do anything with it.

So people do all sorts of things with their resumes. They talk about multiple practice areas. They talk about jobs that have nothing to do with the job. They talk about associations that have nothing to do with that. They talk about their political interest. All these different things go on a resume when in reality the law firm that's reviewing your resume is only looking and trying to make a conclusion of whether or not you're the best product for what they need.
 

You Are a Product in the Legal Market

So if you need a pickup truck, you can choose a small pickup truck. You can choose a middle-sized pickup truck. You can choose a big pickup truck. You can choose a pickup truck that can do a lot of towing, one that doesn't tow you can choose an electric pickup truck. Everybody that chooses a pickup truck chooses a certain type of pickup truck that they want.

It's the same thing with an attorney. A law firm will hire an attorney based on different things. And so you are a product. That's the most important thing to understand. You are not law firms don't care about your ego. They don't care. You, they care. You're a product. And because you're a product, you need to understand that people choose you no differently than the way they would choose a place that you choose, a place to live that you choose.

The type of clothes you want to wear, that you choose the type of doctor that you use, that if you have a lawyer, you're gonna have all these opinions about the type of lawyer you want. So why wouldn't you take those opinions and carry them over to, if somebody's trying to hire you? You choose the type of babysitter you want for your children.

You choose the type of lawn service that you, who you hire for that, and who takes care of it? You choose the workout studio you go to. So every employer is making the same decisions you are. And all they're asking is, does, can this person, is this, does this look like the kind of person that we wanna hire?

Does this person look like they're gonna stick around? They're asking that, does this person, does it look like they're gonna do the things we want them to? Or is this person look like they really wanna work here? And is this person motivated and do they want to get ahead and are they likable? So likable.

If you start putting things on your resume that make you look not likable to certain types of people, why would you do that? People put fancy neighborhoods. They put that they attended private schools, they put that they attend, they play polo, that they're members of these like nice clubs and things and all these things that have nothing to do.

With you getting a job. So I'll talk a lot more about this today, but people will disqualify themselves from jobs all the time. They'll put their political party on there and make people see that. And then so great. So you're gonna disqualify yourself from half the law firms in an area or sometimes all of them you want to be a Democrat in rural Utah, that's probably not a good decision to put that in your, so people put different things on their resumes and that end up hurting them.
 

Let Employers Reach Their Own Conclusions

So the other thing too that we'll see this a lot today on on the resumes you look at. So people, and you may be one of these types of people, but a lot of people, probably more than half or probably more than three quarters will editorialize the resume. They'll tell the reader at the top of the resume with some sort of summary of the type of person they are, and they'll say whatever.

They'll talk about all these different things as if the reader of the resume, the person that's hiring you can't understand whatever is on your resume and reach conclusion. So you don't put summaries on there that it's extremely insulting. I don't think I've ever in the, maybe, but having placed tens of thousands of attorneys, I don't know that I've ever.

Place someone in a law firm that does that? Maybe I have, I just, I don't remember it. At least in the past five years, I don't remember it. I don't remember any recruiters. So you don't, why would you put a summary to insult the reader? You don't tell those reader that you're at a am law firm. You don't you don't have to tell anybody that.

So people wanna reach their own conclusions when they look at your resume. They don't wanna, they don't want to be told what to think. So you wouldn't go out on a date and tell someone you're good looking. Why would you do that? That's absolutely insane. When people go out on dates, they hopefully let other people reach conclusions about them and don't force them into to reaching conclusions.

People feel better about things when they when they reach their own conclusions. So you, you allow people to do that. And people feel much better about people when they reach their own conclusions because they own the conclusion and they don't want to be forced to think a certain thing.

And that's very important. And but a lot of people won't do that. And I'll, again, I'll talk more about that today. So people other also do all these things on their resumes, and I don't know why they do this, but they do. And it, it makes it very difficult for them to get jobs. People will put down their current job.
 

Resume Details That Disqualify You

Now this is a very popular thing, and they'll say, Hey, it's remote. Which again is going to disqualify you from a ton of jobs. That's a disqualifying thing to say. If you wanna work remotely, maybe you can bring that up when you get a job. If you get a job but you don't bring that up on your resume.

You don't mention reduced hours on your resume. I see all the time, and I don't understand it at all. And it's a shame because there are certain law schools where you might have a very significant portion meaning 10 plus percent of people doing this on their resume. And law schools, by the way, are people that teach you how to do your resume for the most part.

And they all mean law schools mean resume companies. Most of them mean well. They're not trying to hurt you. But they have certain beliefs. They may believe that it's important for attorneys to do pro bono work. They may believe that it's important that you list every thing under the sun that you've ever done.

They may want to make you feel good about yourself and stroke your ego by having you list all these things. But again, I have to generate tens of millions of dollars from resumes. That's my job. I have I have. A hundred plus employees to support. I have all these things. So I cannot afford to look at a resume and not pick one that's gonna get a job.

So again, I employ a ton of people doing this and to review to review candidates to place them. And so I know what law firms are looking for. It doesn't matter if you're a worker's compensation personal injury, it doesn't matter. People that are hiring you, if they know what they're doing, and it's a place that's going to have a stable job for you that you're not gonna lose because they're gonna go out of business by hiring the wrong attorneys, there's certain things that good employers are all looking for.

And a good employer is just someone that can stay in business. It's not necessarily, I mean in terms of, it's not means, it doesn't mean it's a good place for you, but it's, this is what decent employers are looking for. So if you start talking on your resume and people do this about pro bono I don't think that's a good idea.

I don't, I see resumes all the time where people will literally have three or four lines about all the pro bono work they did at a big law firm, and then one line about. The paid work that they did, why would, and so they sit around and they've got apartments in New York City and and they're unemployed for months and months, and no one hires them.

And it happens all the time. I, it's very common. Why would you don't talk about, I'm sorry, but if you want to talk about pro bono on your resume and work for a paying law firm, or a paying employer that makes money by billing your hours, then great, go ahead. But they're gonna choose someone that's committed and not doing that.

I think pro bono is great, do it, but you shouldn't talk a lot about it on your resume because what would you want if you were a partner or someone assigning work to you and you said, I got to do pro bono, and then the person, their client didn't get the work done or the commitment. It's just absolutely crazy.

So you also don't mention titles that don't show commitment. So you might've been an attorney, you might've been a staff attorney at a previous role, if that was the case, just don't mention your title if you can, because any type of title that doesn't show commitment is also gonna hurt you. And then there's all sorts of tricks you can use and I'll show everyone today.

You can say, I worked from 2020 to 2023 at or 2000. I don't know, 15 to 2025. It's, three law firm, a couple law firms, including, you don't need to say all the employers, many times you need to I'll show you how to do it. You're not gonna lie, but there's other ways of doing it.

And then anything on your resume that shows you'd rather be doing something else isn't going to get you a job. And so you have people do that all the time. They have all these organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with their practice area working in a law firm, and that ends up hurting them.

And just, these are just a few other things. And I'm gonna, I wanna be able to talk about, show you all this on resumes, but. People do all these things on their resumes all the time that emphasize mediocrity, that emphasize being average or below average, or things that don't make them look that strong.

They think it's important to do lists that they were in the top half of their class or that they they weren't they weren't at the top of their game in terms of whatever they were doing. And that just doesn't help you like anything that you do if you list that it took you, you list your bar passage rate, or when you pass the bar and it shows up on your resume that that it was two years after you graduated from law school or whatever that's not gonna help you.

Because you're at, you're showing something that's not strong. And grade points, if you show that you got a top grade in a couple of classes, that's not gonna help you because you didn't get it to the top grade. In other classes, if you show you the dean's list a few semester, if you show that you were in some association that anyone can join, how does that, what does that show?

How does that help any employer make any conclusions about you that are that positive? If you're just part of some association that doesn't help. Meaningless awards don't help. Being nominated at things don't, doesn't help. Being a runner up being, having experienced in something that's not substantive telling people that you're eligible to wave into the DC bar, which anyone can do, it just makes you look like, why would you try to look like you're not strong or you're admitted to a federal district court, which anyone can do on motion.

Like anything that is just basic that anyone could possibly do isn't going to help you. It doesn't it doesn't move the ball for an employer. And there's just other things that we'll talk about here, resume gaps and stuff, which which are also important. But the biggest thing to remember is law firms are interested in, especially law firms and hiring people that make people money.

That's it. They're businesses. And so you, if you're trying to work for a business then you're gonna, you have to basically be very confident that business is only gonna be trying to hire people that will make money for them. That's what their job is. People that will make money for them and work hard for them.

And so if you want to talk about things that won't make the money, that's going to hurt you. So if you talk about public interest jobs you've had in a lot of detail then that's not the kind of person that typically works in a law firm. If you have written all these articles and things about something else other than your practice area, things that would make people money, that's gonna hurt you.

If you talk about entrepreneurship, like things that you've done businesses you've started and things you might be very proud of that's also probably not gonna go very far. So you need to be emphasizing things that make people money. And people also do all this stuff. Like they I see this all the time.

I was looking, I looked at literally three resumes in a row this morning that did this. But these people I couldn't believe it, like this one, a couple people were out of law school for over five years, and they had very sparse information, like two or three lines about their current jobs their current job, and then maybe one before that.

And then all of their law school experience and things took up like more material than their current job and their last job. That's not smart. Like why would you think it's a good idea to. Write all this information about some position that you only had for eight weeks.

Doesn't make any sense. These are a couple other things, and then I'll try to get to the resume review, but I just wanna make sure that I cover it. If you were part of some political organization, if you were part of some religious organization if you were part of some racial organization that you're drawing attention to that and you're asking the employer to judge you and help you compete for a job based on those things not necessarily performance based on the fact that you made had been a member of a certain organization.

It can be upsetting to, not upsetting, but it could rub certain types of people the wrong way. So it's just something to be very careful with. And again, I've seen that harm. Political ones are a big one that can upset a lot of people. Even if you're interviewing. In a certain law firm. And the people, there's one person that doesn't like people are from that political party that can hurt you.

And if you want to be defined based on your religion or whatever when you go in someplace, that's up to you, but it can hurt you, excuse me. And then papers, articles and things about decisive issues that really show that can harm you as well. And then just, this is just a final thing that I just wanna make sure that people understand and then we'll go to the resumes.
 

Law Firms Hire Specialists, Not Generalists

The next thing is that law firms are hiring specialists and not generalists. So there are very few law firms that have an opening that say they're looking for someone to be a corporate attorney and a litigator or something along those lines. Most of the time, law firms are only looking for people that are going to be a specialist.

And and so what happens on most resumes, and I'm sure we'll see a bunch of examples like this today, is most people will decide that they need to tell an employer every single thing that they've done, as if that's like a real benefit and is really gonna help them. And it's actually the opposite is true.

So if you look like a specialist, then you're gonna get a lot more interviews than people that look like generalists. And you don't have to talk about all of the experience you got at your previous jobs. You can literally. Just say that you were whatever your title was, maybe and then that you work someplace and maybe emphasize the things that are related to your specialty and deemphasize those.

But you have to be very careful about that. And so those are some of the major things that I see. But this is actually a lot because most people politicize their resumes. Most people talk about experience that's completely unrelated to what they're doing. Most people look like they would be rather doing something else.

They have interest on their resumes that come through that have nothing to do with what they're doing. Like an example of that would be someone that maybe talks about how they were in the entertainment law society. They had an entertainment job prior to law school, and then now they're a corporate attorney.

People know that person's gonna try to be an entertainment attorney if they hire them, and it's just not for a corporate job. So there's that. Then there's also all this stuff. That people do on their resumes that really make them sell them make them look average and or even below average instead of strong.

And then looking not committed. And so those are some of the big ones. So we'll talk about that today. But one of the big things I think you should think about anytime you look at your resume, one of the most important things is what do what does someone think after? What would someone think of your resume and what's interesting to you after spending about 10 seconds on it?

And and what comes through? What is, what are the commonalities that come through? And am I looking at someone that looks like a good applicant for this particular type of position? I will take questions and I can take questions if people want.

Also, when I'm reviewing a resume, if people have questions about a specific resume. So I will try to do that as we move through these resumes. Okay. I'm pulling up the resumes. Microsoft resumes. Resume. Basics lingo. Batch one. Turn your resumes read only batch one.
 

Resume Review Example: Solo Practitioner

So this first resume is for a solo practitioner that may be looking for a position. Let's see, and they do personal injury, property damage, commercial litigation, eminent domain and property rights for some cases work primarily on on contract basis, either for the entirety of position such as depositions and hearings.

So this particular resume a couple things. I don't I guess the person went to work inside of a automobile cases for the defense. So they went, worked in front of a, in front for a insurance defense firm for a little bit for one year after a 14 year 13, 12 year position running the own practice.

So here first of all, I don't, I'm not sure about this formatting, but I'm assuming that this is okay. This person is, looks like they're trying, they're saying they do different things. This, I don't think this reads as a, is a very good paragraph for one. And and it says depositions and hearings.

It doesn't talk about if this person did trials. I don't know any of that. And so it's very difficult for me reading this to get any, make any type of conclusion about what type of work this person does. And so I don't I don't know exactly what to make of this 'cause why, what would I be hiring this person to do and why would this person even talk about working on a contract basis?

So this is an example where someone is talking about something that doesn't have any that shows that they're working not on their own practice. They're working as a contract doing depositions and hearings, which isn't something that requires a lot of skill there. It doesn't say there, it does require skill to do a deposition, but just showing up at a hearing is a appearance.

Attorney is probably not something that this person would wanna that wanna emphasize. And then also in terms of this position or in terms of the work that this person's doing, there's no there's not a very in depth discussion of what they're doing. There nothing looks. It doesn't say that they've done trials.

It doesn't say anything. It just says the, this, these kind of words. And so there should be some sort of discussion that's in a little bit more detail than this. And then I'm not even sure, did this person still do work as a solo practitioner when they were working for this as a as a senior trial attorney for this insurance company?

I don't know. But it doesn't look that great to have a one year position that didn't work out if this person's trying to get another position. And I don't know if they're doing defense. I don't know what's happening. So this resume needs a lot of work and there's some issues with it in terms of being descriptive of what the person does.

It doesn't, person doesn't look enthusiastic about what they're doing. Doesn't say anything, just words and things. Why would I hire someone that doesn't look enthusiastic and isn't telling me what they do other than hearings and depositions, which as a contractor, so that just doesn't help.

So this resume, I would say, needs quite a bit of work. And there's issues with this and I, I don't know why I'm doing this one first necessarily, but and there's just a couple other small things here so attorneys don't talk in necessarily and say words like wherein and and and it is just saying wherein defendants make claims for damages like plaintiffs.

In other cases, I mean anybody, I'm, again, I'm not trying to be rude, but just saying that someone makes a counterclaim, you don't need to explain to a reader that when a defendant makes a claim for damages that they do it like a plaintiff. That's just a counterclaim. And compensation trials decided by 12 person jour juries.

Some were for partial damages. Yeah. So a lot of this doesn't necessarily need to have as much detail as there is there. And I think that this particular resume could be improved quite a bit. Someone wants to ask follow up questions about that can.
 

Resume Review Example: Summary-Heavy Government Resume

So here's another resume and this one I'm glad we're taking a look at. So this person has a summary at the top of the resume and I think I spoke about earlier. And a lot of people do this. And if you do this re re removing this is going to help you in terms of fixing up your resume.

'cause you don't need to put a summary at the top. People can get all of this information from from reading your resume as it is. And I'm not sure why some of would have to put that they're interested in continuing to serve this country if they're looking for a another position.

And some other things here like home office, I guess that's okay, but you don't need to emphasize list that, that's your, that's a home office. You can just put a phone number. There's no and you don't even need to say email because if that's a email, then it's gonna be put an email address.

People can reach that conclusion. A lot of times in resumes people put a lot more information that's necessary and the job of an attorney generally, and again, I'm not telling this person the job of an attorney 'cause they are an attorney, but it's easier for people to read information and make conclusions than when you don't make them read more than they have to.

So just these two things, home, office and so forth is an email is not necessary and either is interested in continuing to serve this country if this person hopefully is only applying for government positions. If they're not just applying for government positions, then then maybe then they don't wanna then they probably wouldn't wanna put that if they were trying to get a job in a law firm, for example.

Employment this person worked for. Nine years in in for the Department of Justice. As a senior trial counsel. There's no need to say they work full-time and they can just put down that they were a senior trial counsel. And that and during those dates I'm not sure why they would have to say national courts but maybe and then, let's see here.

Draft drafted court filings, EEG answers to complaints. You can see that this is highlighted here is eg. Period. So one of the most important things that people can do with their resume is to run it through a site like Grammarly or even even chat, GBT or any type of AI program to to make sure that you're that you're, using things properly. So I don't think it's proper to say e, EG without putting a period and and telling people that you draft a court filings as a attorney is probably not necessary. So people will reach conclusions about the type of work you do if you're a senior trial counsel.

Obviously you've drafted complaints and you've developed a litigation strategy and you've done all this sort of stuff. Managing trial teams I guess is good, but you. Probably you, a lot of times when you tell people things that you probably are, that they would know you have done as a position is probably not necessary to draw attention to that.

You just the resume doesn't need to have all that information. And also, if you're retired then I'm not sure why you would be applying for jobs. 'cause you're telling people you're retired. That's not necessarily always the best idea. And a lot of this stuff too that I would, you just there's just certain things.

Let's see here. Let's go there. Detailed to federal programs. Task Force Discovery Officer. Okay. Okay. Trial attorney, US Department of Justice US Department. Let's see. Failed Litigation Task Force. Okay. Conducted all this. Okay, so this is very common also what this person is doing. They are they're creating this government resumes do this quite a bit.
This person has listed a ton of information on their resume that probably isn't necessary. So one of the most important rules of a resume. Is very few resumes of people. Very few resumes are more than one page. Even people that have been working someplace for have worked in, legal profession for 30 plus years.

It's extremely rare for any resume to be more than one page. Sometimes transactional attorneys like real estate or corporate will have a transaction sheet. But in general people have one page resumes and people that have longer resumes are typically, and this is again, I specialize in getting people jobs in law firms.

And but it's the same thing if you're trying to get a job in-house with a substantive company. Those companies are typically going to be run by general counsels that have had a lot of experience in law firms. And so they're gonna be reviewing your resumes no differently than than a law firm would.

So that's important too. But one of the biggest things of of a resume is you don't wanna make people. Read more than they have to. So if you're filing something with a court for anything, the courts always have page limits. The judges don't wanna read long, long sum, long briefs longer than they need to be, or briefs that don't have or have too much information on them.

And they wanna be able to read something and reach conclusions. And one of the ways that the best litigators, for example, will write things is they'll make sure that there's literally a subject heading almost every single page, there's a subhead, there's a subject heading, the subject heading state what's gonna be in the next thing.

So this resume this is a good learning experience because this person doesn't need to really talk very much. They don't need to say this like this is, this doesn't, if they were senior trial counsel with a Department of Justice, that's all they need to say. And if they were at the Department of Justice here, this is all they need to say for these dates, it looks like 2009.
So prior to those dates, and if they were did this job, then they just need to say they're a trial attorney. Reality. And they don't need to stay full time. People are gonna pick up on this. So this is all like far too much information for this resume. No one that's going to hire. A litigator is, needs all of this information.

It's just completely unnecessary. Litigation is litigation. It's doing complaints and answering them and arguing. It's all discovery, expert, witness and deposition that there's no difference than so all of this literally I'm just this stuff could, we could literally just list the titles because who's ever reading this knows what a DOJ attorney does.

Now it could be different divisions and things, but it just, all of this information is not necessary. This is a very good example of things not to do. And this person, to their credit, there's no reason that they would even understand this 'cause they've been working for the government for so long.

But that this information all needs to be stripped down and just it's not. And then all of a sudden here, this person goes into some sort of case lead litigation team and just makes the reader read even more for some five-year case. So that's not necessary. And then. It's just that all this information that just has so little to, it's just unnecessary for anybody to go through.

And why would you make someone read all of this information? Now, this is good. They put this down, but again this is this is just, this is an example too for people that are litigators of something that all litigators do. So you don't need to tell someone that you did litigation, you did discovery in between 1987 and 1990 and you responded to interrogatories.

These are things for people that aren't litigators like, discovery is something that pretty much every first year attorney at any law firm in the country doing any type of litigation, whether it's politic whether it's plaintiff's work or whatever everyone is doing discovery and responding to interrogatories and preparing memos.

And so none of this stuff is necessary. Almost all of the information that's here could be put into almost like one line in terms of the experience. 'cause it's just, it's not necessary. Now, these are jobs here that this person did prior to. Law school, it looks like let's see here. They weren't an attorney.

So when did they graduate from law school? Geez, 1986. Okay, so 1986. Ooh. Okay. So this person, this is an older attorney. So this person should not be drawing attention to jobs they had prior to law school. They are much older. And this person should not be drawing attention to that.

You typically would, you don't wanna list if this person's had this long of a career for 35 plus years. Don't, you don't wanna list positions that you've had prior to law school and it's probably not necessary to also list jobs in the 1980s teaching. You can if you want, and part-time and then all of this stuff at the end of the resume.

So it's just all of these things for winning a just a mo court competition. Not necessary. You need to be very care careful. I guess it's okay that you competed in that, but a young scholar of the year no. And then all these publications. This resume is way too long and it should be no longer than one page.

You can summarize almost everything that you've done pro professionally, and one page you, without a lot of explanation. You can also be all of these awards and honors and things, and these PhD from the summer of 1974 or no, in 1969. Yeah. So all of this stuff should be shortened.

And and that's important. So I think everyone is looking at this. We can, we'll get a lot more resumes today, but this is far too long and it's gonna hurt the person. Okay. New York City lawyer. So let's see. Relevant legal experience. So email address, phone number. Okay. I don't know, obvious that it's necessary to, for people to put their address on a resumes.
 

Resume Review Example: Labor and Employment / Union Resume

I don't I guess people, if you're trying to apply, if you're living in. Washington DC and you, your spouse lives in Denver. Maybe you can put that address on your resume to show that you have connections there. But in general there's no need to really put your address there on your resume.

Take a look also at when you're looking at when you're looking at a legal document, and this is one of the things that people often don't understand that well. And and this is something that you are taught at very good law firms usually because you have to learn how to shorten things for a reader specifically a court because you don't want the court or whoever's reading it to read more words than are necessary.

And this is just a important type of lesson for everyone to learn. So if someone was professionally reading this, like a very good attorney at a major law firm and this was a brief to the court, they would take a look at experience and they would say relevant legal experience. They wouldn't tell the reader that it was relevant or it was the legal, because someone that's reading this is going to understand that that this experience is relevant and you don't need to tell the reader that.

You would just say experience. So anytime you are, start using things like that, everyone should go through and they should read their resume and figure out if there's a way to make things much more succinct and meaning just literally doing, going through line by line. And are there ways to shorten things?

So let's see what this person does. Representation of union members running for executive board and contested union election and follow-up court administrative represent individuals and seeking this represent workers. Then before fair employment practice groups setting, settling 90% of the matters.

Prior to protracted litigation, I work on behalf of high asset clients drafting extensive pro bono work. Okay, so this person has had their own practice for four years which is good. I'm assuming that they may want to go into working. In a a law firm. Now, I don't know and they may want to go into a law firm representing either individuals or I'm assuming representing workers and workers and compensation related work potentially, or or in a in for an employment pursuing be being in a labor an employment union attorney.

So they may be interested in doing those things. So this is actually interesting, this resume. I I'd like this resume to be honest with you. It's too long, but there's some good things about it. And the good things, just so you can, everyone can see this right away. This person is a, is doing union related work.

So I like that. And it's it's employment related work it's employment and and municipal related work. So this is a and then you look at this position and they're doing something very similar. And then and then it looks like in this position they did something very similar. And then in this position they did something very similar.

And then and then here we're getting off track here a little bit, but next, similar and labor. And this is all related to labor and civil rights. So this is a, believe it or not it's there, there's, this is a, it's a pretty decent resume. And this person if they were to make this resume one page and much shorter they could probably be much more employable and than what they're doing right now.

What do you do with this? What does this person do with this resume? So the first thing is that because the resume is too long, it needs to be shortened. So in order to shorten it they need to take a ton of this information off there. And and they don't need all of this information successfully defended challenges to leadership and things.
Maybe but if someone's a director of legal affairs for a municipal union, there's pro there's gonna be things that that they do that that they that can be shortened in terms of what they do. And and all of this stuff can be shortened quite a bit. And then same thing here.

Prior, workers' rights attorney, that's, if they're a workers' rights attorney, that pretty much says what the person does. And they did labor law there and then they worked for a union there. And then and let's take a look at all these other jobs. And then there's no law school graduation date.

And then the person also has taken off all of these dates for these previous firms. Which is fine. But there, both of these resumes we've looked at by the way. Which is yeah, it's interesting. Both of them are for older attorneys and it does become much more difficult for attorneys when they get more senior to get positions and they often believe that which makes sense.

I would probably feel the same way that if they put more information on their resumes that of what they've done in the past, it's going to make them maybe more marketable. And in reality you probably don't want, wanna have as much information on your resume and this stuff about pro bono and everything.

So the point being, if you've worked for all these different places you don't need to talk about all of them. You probably would want to maybe mention these last couple jobs and then after that, just you would put down, and you wanna be honest with the dates. There's no reason to to talk about, not talk about the dates.

But you would literally go in and you would say, between these dates and this date I did I worked in these types of employers. And then you would say you would mention a couple of them and and then that's it. So how would that work? It would basically be you could say labor and employment.

I, I'm not, I'm just giving you an example of a labor, union side or employee side labor attorney. Attorney sorry. Employment of Union, employ Union. I don't, union attorney whatever. Then you would put the dates and then you would summarize something along the lines of work for you, work for small law firms, work for law firms, including law firms, and the government, and, us, New York City, corporate Council, corporation Council, just something along amongst others doing this type of work, doing, union, just whatever the work is.

Do you know, one line about the work? So just something along most lines, nothing. Nothing that's, you don't need to draw a lot of attention to it. And then if you do that, then you can just get rid of all this information. Talking about the fact that you were a temporary labor attorney. No one's gonna go back and check if you were temporary or full-time.

If you're ERISA like that's unrelated to what you're doing, there's no reason to put that in there. There's no reason to put all of this in there. So all of that information should come out. And having that in your resume, it's just not helping you. And and even here, I'm sorry. So you would you would move this up here, you move this up here, and then you would go like that.

And I don't want to get in too much detail here, but this, honestly, all of this can be dramatically shortened. No one is going to read all of this information and and even senior, the director of legal Affairs for a municipal union, even that could, people don't even need all that information.

And then this could be whatever, just description of the description of represent individual, seeking reasonable accommodations, represent workers, whatever. It can be much shorter. And then and then all of this comes out. And just keep in mind that people, the more information you're showing people the the better people don't care about your citizenship.

I don't see how that's gonna help you. You can certainly talk about the fact that you spent, you speak English, but but I don't in French, I guess if you want, but I don't think that's helping, really moving the needle. And of course, if you've been practicing for, and people do this all the time, they say, oh, I've been an attorney for 20 years, and why would I, and this can be a little longer than I've done here, but if you're an attorney, if you've been an attorney for several years, there's no reason to tell the employer that you're admitted to the State Bar of New York. And there's no reason to tell people that you waived in to a federal district court or that second Court of appeals or the Second Circuit Court of appeals.

So if somebody is looking for a attorney, then then they can reach conclusions fairly easily about what an employee rights attorney does based on you having one or two lines about this. And then one or two lines about that. And if someone has this resume, it's suddenly much easier for an employer to read.

And if you give them one or two lines about what you've done then they're gonna have a basic understanding of what you are. And one of the things that's interesting about this, and I'll just tell you why this is important, attorneys that are like partners at AM law, 100 law firms and the most major law firms in the country, like the best law firms in the country.
It could be whatever. The, just the very, very best law firms, they will have resumes if they've been practicing for 20 years, 30 years. They don't really look much different than this. They say the name of the firm and they say litigation partner, and then they may say, represent primarily this type of person, but they don't say a lot.

They just basically say the name of the employer and maybe the name of the where they work before, where they were a partner. And if they were partner at five firms, they would just say, worked in some of these are some of the firms I was a partner of. But the, their resume is usually never longer than one page because people can understand this is what someone, that's a partner this firm does.

And that's it. And they don't need to have a lot of detail and they don't need to tell people exact everything that they do because people know what a litigator is. People know what someone that represents employee employees, and a plaintiff's legal practice does. So if this person.

Maybe there's a senior, like a law firm that files lawsuits against employers or, and they apply there, then all of a sudden they have a good opportunity getting positions there and articles that are for the Women's Rights report, or probably necessary other. So just something along these lines obviously is gonna give this person a lot more bang for their buck than than what they're doing because the way things are you're you're showing that you don't have the ability or you don't have the interest and being very direct with the work that you're doing and with employers.

And so that is one of the biggest pieces of advice that I can give everyone here, just to really, the more you are able to tighten up your resume the better. And you don't have to tell people basic things. Even here, reasonable accommodations. That's, people know what that is.

You don't have to say medical disability. It's just reasonable accommodations. And you don't have to say that you settled up to 90 things. That's not necessary either. And and then you don't have to say you worked on behalf of high asset clients. It's just no, you you make people think that you're a plaintiff's employment attorney with experience in unions or what, whatever, and or union as a defense.

And there's a but you make that would actually be, if they were working for a union, they'd be an plaintiff. So a plaintiff's union lawyer, plaintiff's employment lawyer. That's it. And and then that's all people need. They don't need all of this explanation. So most people do that. Most people have resumes that are too long.

It draws attention to the fact that maybe you're not a good you're not able to reduce arguments to simple things. And that, that upsets people because it makes them work hard to read things. And then a good attorney reading your resume is gonna think, Hey, I need to go back that this person's gonna gimme all this convoluted work that doesn't make the points easily, and I'm gonna need to go through and.

Fix. And so you need to think that way. It's by the way law school exams bar exams the people that get the best grades in law school, their exams are not 10 pages of writing. They're very direct. And this is what people do when they are the top students at the top law schools. They're very, there's no bs.

It's just direct. This is the issue. This is the blah, blah, blah. This is the law. This is why this applies. Conclusion. This is very simple. Resumes need to be, and you're really, when you're showing a resume, you're trying out, you're showing the kind of law you run many times, and I'm not saying that this person's a bad lawyer, but I'm saying that if they're trying to work in a law firm, which it looks like they haven't really done since for a long time then that's what's expected in most of them.
 

Resume Review Example: Entertainment and In-House Resume

Okay, let's see here. Legal experience in-house counsel. Okay, so same thing. You don't call yourself Esquire. Obviously someone that went to law school is an Esquire, so I'm not really I don't understand why people do that. And you don't need to do that. People call themselves Esquire. We'll see some other examples of people listing all these other titles and things later this morning or afternoon.

But you don't need to call yourself Esquire. You don't need to tell people your experience is legal. You don't need to do that. So let's see what this person is doing.

Guess this person's a generalist, okay? Business aligned legal solutions. Okay, let's see here. I'm reading all of this experience. This person got. Okay, so this is interesting. We'll talk about this right now. Okay. So to start this person their experience they worked for four years as a. Entertainment attorney. So that's what all this is about. Working as an entertainment attorney, which actually looks a pretty good experience. I like this experience that they got as a entertainment attorney, but they've had a job since 2025. And you can see here that their experience of a job that they've had for the past seven months is just as long as they have just as much information as this position that they had for four years.

So that's interesting, like why would a job that they've had for seven months be as long as something that they had for four years? So this person by the way probably wants to be, I'm assuming an entertainment lawyer because if you look at, and this is again, this is a mistake that a lot of people make.

So you look at this person's experience right here, and this is not entertainment law. There's seven or eight months of experience. Then this is four years of entertainment law. And then this is this is a virtual summer associate And as a virtual summer associate in the summer of 2021. Their experience is just as long almost as their experience, their four years of experience working for this firm right here.

And then what kind of work was this? Paralegal? Okay. Nothing legal assistant. Okay. Three years and then all this stuff. Okay. Race relations. Okay. So here's what this person needs to do. So this person has only had this job since 2025 or since May of 2025. So all of this stuff here I believe is probably unless I'm, and I'm assuming just from looking at this resume there's a couple things that this person could be doing.

The problem with this current experience because this person worked in a law firm for four years, and the problem with this current experience is that it's not in a law firm. So it's a different practice setting. So you need to be careful about that. Because law firms, typically, if this person wanted to get a position in a law firm, the law firm would want to.
Hire someone that was coming from another law firm, not someone that was working for a medical diagnostics company. So that's the first thing. And reality is interesting. I'll just bring this, I'll just throw this out there. This person, if they wanted to get another job, and if they wanted to get a job in another law firm they'd almost be better off not even talking about their experience here.

They could, I'm not probably eth not necessarily ethical one way or another and talk about the current experience. They could talk about just this experience because they'd have a better chance if they were doing that. But all this stuff here needs to probably just be you can do two things.

You can look for the the the commonalities, which is interesting. So I just wanna show you something here. So you have intellectual property licensing and commercialization that you have. Let's see here. License technology, licensing and SAS. And the reason I'm showing you this is because there are some things that this person might wanna do because this experience here is the same.

So licensing, distribution, here right here. And yeah. And then all this kind of stuff here that's related. And it, and this is a, and you have some IP. So this person here is doing licensing, software services, licensing and then and then licensing. And and then some of the stuff here is very similar.

You'd, and the reason I'm doing this is because this person I don't know what they want what kind of position they want and it's, I guess it's not really completely relevant, but these are some things that look consistent. So this person could, if they talked about licensing and they talked about IP protection, and they have this here, what I would do if I was this person and I was looking, I wanted to get a job in another, in an entertainment company or something that's related to this, I would probably try to highlight this and then just move all, take all this other stuff off.

And so what I'm trying to do here and show everyone. Is to have to make this resume have the scent of something that makes the person look like a good candidate for that. Because this, and I'm not trying to be mean here, but this resume has gone off the, is taken four years of experience or four and a half and all of a sudden is put it into something else that's not even related and that's not that helpful because why would you get, and again, I'm not criticizing this person, but this person was very interested in being a working in entertainment law.

So they spent the summer 2021, then they spent the four and a half years doing that, and then all of a sudden they're just doing something completely different. So why would a. Why would a law firm hire someone that's no longer doing what they have while they're training in? And so that's a problem. And so if I was representing this person, I would tell them you better be very careful.

You should probably be looking at every potential in-house entertainment company and also every potential law firm that does entertainment that you can find. And and then if you're gonna put all this on your resume, then you probably should try to emphasize commonalities between this and this things that are related.

So the experience at least looks continuous because suddenly having a different practice here on your resume after five years is very dangerous. So I hope everyone sees, this is actually a very good example. So not only is this person in a different practice setting than a law firm, which is.

Could be catastrophic if you want to get a job in another law firm. It's not catastrophic, but it's very it could, it's har it's harder because law firms hire people from the same practice setting. But this particular person is now in another practice area, which is even scarier. And and so what do they do?

So the only thing that I would say is just making sure that you're trying to look like the least. There's some continuity in the work and not all of a sudden bringing up healthcare compliance, corporate governments, and all this sort of stuff. It's just too much. You're essentially doing a lot of the stuff as an attorney with six, with less than six months of experience or seven or whatever the number is.

And that's not a good idea. So it's just, it's dangerous. And and then the next thing is. With this experience, which I actually, I'm not, I don't dislike this person. I think it's pretty good experience. I think it's I don't mind it, but saying that you had a job for five years and you save $1.5 million for your clients, that's highlighting something that's not strong.
So why would you say that you did something over five years and got $1.5 million in revenue for your clients? That's not good. And so that's something to think about. And then a lot of the stuff, high profile musicians and distribution platforms, including contributing to the successful peer careers of projects and re known clients.

So this is the same example that I talked about earlier, where you should try to shorten this person should try to shorten the stuff and reducing legal disputes by 20%. Like, how would you possibly know that? And that, that information. Yeah. I would you can shorten this tremendously.

One of the things too that's very useful sometimes and I recommend doing this, is you can run this through chat GBT or something and just say, with a very simple command. And we'll do this with some resumes, hopefully today, but with a very simple command just saying, can I, can you shorten this and make it this resume much easier to read?
And so most of this stuff could be shortened fairly dramatically. Lemme just actually try this. most of these resumes if you, any resume by the way should be you should do whatever you can to really run it through Chad GBT or something to to make it much shorter and easier for people to read.

And this, by the way you don't have to use Chad GBT. You can use you can use gr, you can use whatever. But you need to be running your resume through these programs to shorten it and to make it look like you do one thing as well.
Can shorten this subscription to to make it easier, to make it easier for employers to, so this just to that, and I'm just, this is not perfect, but show you what it's gonna do. There's a, so it's saying 1.5 million in revenue, but I still this is yeah, both three bullets.

Yeah, three bullets. Please eliminate, least make three bullets. Bullets and in make the person look strong. Look strong. And so you need to get good at these prompts and not, a average i one point 0.5 million in revenue savings.
Yeah, and again, I would take off this 1.5 million in revenue, but yeah, this is it. So this is all the person needs is something like that. And it could be even shorter than that. And 1.5 million in client revenue. I mean that I don't think that's something that's necessary. I would, you can make it like that.

Now, just one other thing I wanna show everyone about this resume that I think is fun. So let's do this. Let's take this and let's make this we'll do a couple things here. Can you make, we'll this consist all this experience, look consistent and in one practice area, if possible, in the serum, can you make some, make all of this experience consistent?

Consistent and in one practice area? And this is something I'm gonna talk to you guys a lot about today and women. And all in one practice here. 'cause remember, law firms hire specialists and so do all employers. So here deemphasize emphasize, emphasize the shorter term jobs. Shorter term jobs.

Lemme do that. Let's see what happens. Now this will be fun. So wait till you see what happens here. What the heck? Something should not have copied there. All right, I'm not gonna show that, 'cause whenever I copied something which isn't copied correctly, but the point is that with this related thing, with this stuff most of this should be much shorter.
So this person does not even probably need to say other anything other than they did a few of these things that are related. And but maybe related to what's below then agreements like that you don't need to say these types of things.
And then you would say you would shorten this dramatically the way I showed you here. Lemme just show you that. See here. Tighter version, even tighter version right here. And I'm spending a lot of time in this example just 'cause this is a very common type of, oh boy, there thing to shorten, sorry, just making sure that all of this stuff is shortened fairly dramatically. And the, and then in addition to that, like what I don't like as well with this is this person. There's several things wrong here.

The first thing is there's not the need to have all of this information here for this, the, where the, all the information belongs is in the job that the person had for the most time. And then all of this thing here working as the summer associate. All of this information if they work for an entertainment place, that's it.

That's all they need. And they also don't need to say they were virtual. That why would you highlight something that hurts you? And why would you, again, highlight something here driving revenue. So driving client revenue. Why would you highlight things that are that are not necessarily strong?

So you don't talk a lot about this job 'cause you haven't had it in a long time. You talk, most of your talk you make about this you don't need to say you're virtual. You don't even need to say what you did as a summer associate. And then you also don't need to say. If you list it at all, you don't need to say what you did as a legal assistant and as a paralegal, you don't.

None of that information is necessary. And I'll go so far as to say that this person doesn't even need, you don't even need to put down that you were a paralegal or a legal assistant prior to law school. You can if you like, but you don't need to even put that, because if you don't put that your resume literally would be almost as strong without it.

And you only need to have this resume be one page. And then one other thing I'm gonna say that. That I don't know that it's just something that's gonna be a personal choice, but a lot of times you don't need to say even what your emphasis is. You just say you got a master's in mass communications.

'Cause I don't know that crisis management has anything to do with your current position. And this person also spelled cu la wrong, and we'll go back in there in a second. So I hope that makes sense. Same thing here. Why would you say Bard Mission, Georgia, when you worked as an attorney for four years in Georgia?

So that's also not necessary as well. Making this resume much shorter leading with this job where you did a lot of this types of work, type of work, and this is good. And then if you want leaving that, but making everything one page is very much stronger that way. I don't even know that you need to say senior in-house counsel, but you can't.

So that's how I would recommend that. And then, because this person's not that old, if the, their job was from 2013, I'm not sure why you would not put the dates of when you graduated from law school. One of the things, we've seen this example several times, and one, the, that example essentially is.

What people are doing is they're people that are older and haven't been out of school for some time aren't listing their graduation dates. Pretty much people will understand that if you're if you're not listing it, they'll think that you're very old and hiding something and there's nothing wrong with being older and you list it and it's just you and you're transparent.
So there's no need really many times to hide anything. You're welcome to if you want, but that's basically just announcing to an employer that I think you're gonna discriminate against me based on my age, which many will. And so you just have to, realize that. But yeah. And then the other big point I think that we covered, and I just wanna keep coming back to this again and again, is you don't list anything on your resume that's going to detract from the overall message you're trying to give people.

So this person want, you want this person should be looking like an entertainment law firm. If they can, an entertainment attorney, because that's what all their experience is. And if it was me representing this person or I was this person, I would do everything I could to try to find a position.

Entertainment firm or a a law firm that does entertainment or someplace that does entertainment, because all of this stuff is just taking this person directly off the path of what they did. Okay. So here we go. This is a very sim very common type of resume. And and, we'll, I'm glad I'm actually looking at this 'cause this is a, these are very, people are doing these resumes a lot.
 

Resume Review Example: Privacy Resume

These, this is a privacy resume and people for several years ago, maybe three, three years ago privacy attorneys were very much in demand. And that's not necessarily the case right now. So you need to I, it's important to, to realize that that if you're thinking about getting this branch of law it's much harder now than it was.

And there's not as much of the work than there was before. There was a lot of it and people were getting hired in house and things, and it's just not that popular at the moment. So this is another example. The person's calling themselves Esquire, and a lot of times one of the things I'll just bring up is a lot of times people that are submitting their resumes for these resume reviews.

I'm glad that they do because they're doing things that are preventing them from getting interviews. And they may be wondering like, why am I not getting interviews and what's happening? What am I doing wrong? And and I can tell you in each of these cases that we've looked at, there's a there's there's a lot wrong or this person's not even writing a complete paragraph about what their experience is.

And and then this person is making anybody, everybody read all this relevant information and assist what they could be summarized in one page. And again, I'm not criticizing anyone 'cause no one teaches people how to do this. And then geez, just took, okay. And then using too many words and and having this resume was way too long.

And so why aren't I getting interviews? And then this person having more description is just as much description of their experience here as they do in this long term job for four years. And then when they were working as a summer associate and then using words that are detracting, things that are detracting from why would you tell people you were virtual that?
Because you want them to know that you didn't five years ago you didn't get enough. You were working remotely instead of in an office. Is that help? Is it that Who cares? And the legal, and having these descriptions of jobs that no one cares what a legal assistant or a paralegal is doing.

It's just irrelevant. And then having things related to race relations and crisis management. There's just master of science and mass communication. That's all you need. That's it. Okay. So list this person. So this person's calling themselves Esquire and now, and they're also trying to tell you that they have gotten the certification and privacy privacy law.

That's not who this person is. Like they don't need to lead with that title. And I if someone's hiring for someone that has that experience, that's great, but they don't need to list that there. They can list it as a certification at the bottom of their resume. And so you don't need that. And I don't know if this person has listed their address or they just put Birmingham, Alabama, but you don't need that.

Business minded attorney with 10 years of experience transitioning into privacy leadership with three years focused on this. Key achievements include blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And strategic guidance informing facility sign extension. 15,000 users currently enrolled in an AI governance course.

again, we talk, I've brought this up at the beginning of the webinar. I will bring this up. Again you don't need to affecting 2000 patient records. Fi. Okay. So none of this information is necessary. Whoever's reading your resume will reach their own conclusions.

They don't need you to tell them how to think about that. So if you go out on a date with someone or whatever, you're not gonna sit down and give them a one paragraph summary of yourself. They're gonna reach their own conclusions pretty quickly. And maybe they would don on a dating site or something, but no, you don't have to tell these people all this.
This is assuming that a general counsel of a company does not know how to read your resume. And when people do this, it just I wanna make sure everyone understand this. 'cause this is something that most res, a ton of resumes do, and a good percentage. And so you're not, this is not anything that this person would ever have been taught.

This is nothing that this person is, would have any way of understanding. Were I not telling them that. So what happens is there's resume companies. Sometimes companies will let people go and they'll send them out to give them a training and a resume. Sometimes different. Some, sometimes you'll go to a resume person that does all different types of resumes and they'll tell you to do this.

And and no, you don't need this. And then here we go. This person, now they're saying. Core competencies is if an employer can't deduce this from the resume, geez, AI governance, cross-functional collaboration, advising senior management, and this is what attorneys do. They advise people and you don't need to tell them that they do business units.

And so all this comes off too. No, you don't need that. Okay and then career summary. No, that's why would you tell people you're summarizing the career, didn't you do this up here? So same thing, you would just you, and you don't even, people don't even need the right experience. You can if you want, but you don't need career summary.

You just put data breach attorney and then I don't know what type of attorney this person is, but they don't need to call themselves the data breach attorney. It's interesting that you would do that, but it's data breach. Then Privacy counsel, I don't see people with those titles generally. Typically a title's gonna be associate, it's gonna be partner something along those lines.

I don't know what this person's title is. And then and this is good then they were, same thing. They were. A they were all this, but What's going on here? Okay it's the same thing here. This person is it's the same thing that happened with a last attorney.

And this is interesting 'cause this person's actually a primarily a law firm attorney, it looks like. And and before that was general counsel. What this person's doing actually pretty well in this that's good that I like, is between, actually, they're doing a couple things that are good here.

But let me tell you what this person's doing that that I like. So between 2022 and 2020 into the present, which is the past three years, they've gone and they've made, basically made themselves into a privacy attorney, which is great. So they have experience doing one branch, one type of law, and essentially, and they're breaking it up into all these different things and and telling you what they did and which is fine.

So that, that's actually good. And they've done that. If there's, it's consistent they're not talking about a lot of different things. And and then then they did this as general counsel, this company, and then and then this particular position, the one that they had presumably between 2011 and 15 and when they were law clerk and so forth, they have taken that, and they haven't even talked about that experience.

And then this experience is different. So I'll tell, let me just do, we'll just do this chat GBT experiment again real quickly. And we'll run it through here. And I would say. For this particular person, let's try to make this person, let's shorten this like significantly and make the person look like a privacy attorney.

And this is important. Resume look like primarily privacy data turning. All right, so let's get the. Okay, so here we go. So this is an example of how this could be shortened significantly. Lemme see. Significantly shortened. Let's see, privacy law firm company. Okay no single identity, no job hopping signal rose consolidated in continuous practice. That's actually interesting what they did here.

And I this is fascinating. And it's exactly what should be happening here. So this, because this person has had positions over the past 10 years what this, and this is very helpful for people. I want everyone to understand what's going on here. So in this resume. This person has had several jobs between 2015 and the present.

And what this is doing here, this is very powerful. What Cheche BT did, and I didn't even tell it to do that. But it's giving them a single identity as a data privacy attorney it's showing it's making sure that they're not showing job hopping, because the law, whoever's hiring them it doesn't want them, it's trying to make it look like they're they're not moving.
Which is good. And then it's making them look like a partner in house ready and which is actually very good. And then saying, I can expand it for these different types of jobs. But but this is very good. So it's taken, I want everyone to understand this, and this is a very good what it's done.

And this is something that if most resumes did this, most resumes like the ones we've looked at today of very senior people, if most resumes did this, the people would drastically increase their odds of getting jobs by this resume right now with these fixes is going to be, I would guess 10 times or five to 10 times maybe.

I don't know what those statistics are, but multiple times more effective. Meaning if, 20 people look at this resume now and maybe, or 50 and before one out of 50 were interested. Now maybe 10 out of 50 will be interested because of how well this is done. So this person right now has all this crap going on here, right?

All these different things going on. They have all this information at the top. They're telling people how to think. They have these things that talk about core competencies. They talk about all these different jobs that are fairly short term. It looks like each one's about a year. They're doing all that.

And then they have all of these positions that they may have, that they've had before. So it's very long. And so what they can do now is you can take all of this information off and let's go right here and you can see that. Then you have this. So you have privacy and data. You could say law firm and companies.

So you could basically list both employers, 2015 to the present. All this information comes out. 'Cause it's not necessary anymore. And and let's see what happened here. 2000, yeah, 2015, general counsel. And so you take all of these different positions and you make them essentially into to you, you name law firms and you would, you, you don't even you could even say this and you could say worked at top, lead to top law firms, including something like this worked in as in-house counsel.

I'm just showing you how this is done in house counsel and and law firm. Law firm has law firms as on, as then you would just say something on data privacy. No. Including, something along those lines. So you just, you summarize this and you could say law firm, you name or that, but you summarize everything into one thing because this is all that people really need to see, and they also don't need to see all of the, these different employers.
 

Resume Strategy: Consolidate Experience and Look Like a Specialist

And so sum shortening things like that is extremely powerful. And because what it does is it takes someone, it makes them look like a subject matter expert. It doesn't draw attention to moving, it doesn't draw attention to things that are unrelated to what the law firm's hiring for. People are just interested in this and they don't need to see all these bolds and things.

They don't need to do that either. So let's do that. And you take out the bolding, but essentially like that is, is actually, this is very good now. And then you take that and then and then you can have let's see. This person does this, we will talk about how to fix that as well. So right now we're still at about one page, and then you take all this.

This resume, this person is not gonna like this. Who, if you know you're watching this, you're not gonna what I'm doing to your privacy resume. But I'm telling you like this will massively in increase that you can go education, license and certifications fine. University of Tennessee, Alabama Bar.

No, you worked in an al but you don't need to tell people that. AI governance. Okay, that's fine. And then professional development. No, and that's it. So this is all, this resume needs. You could put a little bit more if you want. I don't know where's the college the person went to? College missing.

That's interesting. College missing. Yeah. But that's, this is really all you need. And it doesn't need to be much longer than this. You could make it a little bit longer than that, but it, this if you had this and nothing more and you can mention one or two of them you're gonna get a lot more interviews mentioned one than if you didn't than if you had currently what you have.

Okay? You can see all this stuff can come out. And again, employers do not wanna read all this. People think it's important to list everything that they've done, but what's more important is having somebody read your resume and bring you in for an interview that's more important. Okay? Let's see. In experience, X, Y, Z.

LLP of Counsel, US District Court Litigation. Associate Commercial Litigation Associate. Oh, sorry, I'm not, I didn't I wasn't showing the the resume. Resume review. Sorry. Legal resume basics. Sorry, Resumes alright. Yeah, so just I had copied something and wasn't showing it, but this is the resume that we were looking at previously for this privacy attorney. It just went on and on. And what I did is I took out the professional development, I left the education licenses and CER certifications.

You can take out the Alabama bar 'cause obviously the person and then all the stuff could be shortened and taken out. And then essentially what you're left with is something like this and. This is going to be much is much better and it's just much shorter to have it like that. And this, again, like I said, this person probably won't like that.

But what you're doing here is you're eliminating things that employers don't necessarily wanna see. They don't wanna see all this job hopping, they don't wanna see unrelated experience they don't wanna see just all of this information to make them read through all this. It's just it's unnecessary and people don't want all this.

So you shorten it and do that to it. Okay, so this is a good resume to, to look at. This is a law firm resume that I like quite a bit. And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about it right now and what, what's going on with this person. So let's go back to the beginning.

License in New York, New Jersey. Okay, that's good. Pass the U-S-C-P-A exam fluent manner. Okay. This is all good. So admissions and skills is fine. Education what everything this person did here is fine. I don't know that they need to list their minor. It's not really relevant. Judicial internships.

Okay, we'll talk about that. This is actually fine. The attorney. Here doesn't tell you a lot of what they did, so that's actually good. And I'm sorry to look at this backwards. I'm just it's it's good. So there's a lot of things that are good about this resume. But there's also some issues that that don't necessarily need to be to that can be fixed.

And you can see here this person is, they've just said experience. They don't tell you related legal experience. They just say experience. And a lot of this writing ability and the way that this person has tightened up their resume. And one of the reasons that this is actually a pretty good resume and I want everyone to notice something too.

This person is not even what's, what happened here? Where's that? This person isn't even from the United States. They're from Taiwan, but they're, the way that they've written this is much, much better than. Most us, all the US attorney resumes that we've reviewed so far, it's much better. So there's it's just interesting that to think that this person has written a, a better resume when they don't even speak English as a first language.

They've learned how to tighten things up and so forth. Okay, so let's take a look at this. The first thing is, I don't recommend if you've had a job for one month and you're applying to firms right now with a job that's only been one month. I don't know how important it is to list that. Now, if you're on a website of the company or the firm or something and people are gonna search for your name and find that, then maybe that's okay.

But the, there's really I don't see the point of putting that on there. It sounds like you're of counsel. I doubt you're on the website. And if you're not, then there's no reason to really list that on there if you don't need to. Okay. Let's see. I just wanna make sure I understand something here.
 

Resume Review Example: Litigation Resume and Clerkship Path

This person graduated from law school in 2018, okay? 2018. Okay? One 18. All right. So I don't know that it's necessarily to leave that on there, so I'm gonna just x that out. And then this person was a clerk for one year. So anytime you do a job where everybody knows what it is every judicial clerk and every one of the 650 plus judges in the country and the two law clerks, all the federal district judges get, most of them do the exact same thing so many times.

You don't need to tell people and for four different lines, if you're a federal law clerk or a lot of these types of positions, what you did because every judicial law clerk essentially does the same thing. I work for a federal district judge. Now, this is a very prestigious clerkship by the way.

This person had working in the Eastern District of New York, who's amazing. But at the same time, this person doesn't need to list that. You can list all the experience you got there if you want, but you're just taking up space and no one that's interested in hiring you for a litigation job is really gonna pay attention to what you're writing.

So some jobs you just don't need to list a lot. Now this is interesting. So this person is doing commercial and securities litigation. And then let's see. Dispositive disputes co-led a motion for summary judgment. You probably don't need to say that. You wrote a summary judgment motion and and this person is doing securities and here also securities.

And you have this person has to make some decisions. So what are the decisions this person needs to make? So the first thing is that they call themselves a litigation associate here. And then for whatever reason, they call themselves a commercial litigation associate here. And I don't understand.

So when you think about the titles that you have you typically, you don't want to say anything that if these looks to me like these are the same things I could be wrong, but they look to me to be the same thing. So you just call yourself you could call yourself an associate. You don't even need to say that you were litigation or commercial because people are gonna pick up on what that was just based on the kind of work you're doing.

And if you're doing securities litigation, then maybe that's all you want to talk about. So you have, this person actually has two options. And this is interesting. This person can either be commercial litigation or they can be commercial lit or they can be commercial and anybody that's a litigator will understand what I'm talking about.

Commercial and securities. Or they could even be just securities, lemme say. And securities. Or securities litigation. Securities or just us. So this, they have this, these two options. They have them here, and then they have them for this position as well. So they have one option, two options.

So they can do either of those most of the time. If you are a if you've done a federal clerkship you're going to have the option of being most, sorry, most people that are federal law clerks. That's a commercial litigation associate position. So you would typically be if you're a federal law clerk, you would be someone that would be you could do commercial litigation or this person could do securities litigation and which is good.

They have basically, they have a couple different options. Okay. Then this, let's see, the person work for the New Jersey superior Court, Trenton, New Jersey. Okay. Drafted opinions. Okay, so that was a clerkship. Let's see. New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. Okay, let's see there. So they can do I probably would have a title there for that.

Attorney worked with two law firms on financial litigation projects February to August of 2021. Okay, so this this is an interesting resume from from a lot of reasons. But I'll tell you some there, there's actually some fairly decent problems with it that need to be fixed.

But one of the first is if you don't have to say you're there on a contract basis you could just say you're a council. You could say but there's no reason to ever draw attention that you're doing something as a contractor. Because if you draw attention to that, then it's going to look like you couldn't get a job doing something full-time.

And that's not good. You graduated from your clerkship in October, 2025, and even though that was a very prestigious job for whatever reason, and I'm sure you were doing it while you were working, this person was that couldn't get a position. Now, one of the things you might ask yourself is, why couldn't this person get a position?

I want someone, everyone to understand. 'cause there's a lesson to this resume that's very relevant to everyone's job, to career. The first thing is they're in New York City, which there's people in law firms in New York have a lot of choices of who to hire. But one of the big problems here is there's not a ton of employment stability.

This. Person left this job in June and then they didn't get another job for four months, which is, okay, if it was a clerkship. But this was a short term job of a year last, this was less than a year. And then this was a year. And then this was looks like six months. And and so there's some issues here related to employment stability.

And and this is also, this is a. This is a contract job. Another one, they were a contractor. I don't know how this person got a clerkship, but it's awesome that they did a very prestigious one. But this is a contractor job and and then this is just a complete practice area change from what they did before.

So I would if I was this person, I I can't really recommend what they should do, but in my opinion, I would probably take this contract stuff off, no one cares, and then I would leave this on here, this two year job, which is fine. And then I would probably take, I would probably just leave it as it is.

But this particular resume any, and I'll just tell you the problems with it. So anytime you're drawing attention to things that aren't, to don't make you look strong, which is having a contractor job at the top of your resume that's gonna hurt you. The law clerk job at the top of the resume is actually very good.

That's should be what this person leads with this x, y, Z law firm is good. And so is the ZZ Law Firm whatever this is. ZZZI guess we're taking out these for the persons. That's good. And and it's good also that this is a decent this is a decent description and this is a decent risk description.

And then this is not. Necessary. You could say, just clerk or whatever. It's, and then this is not necessary. And then and there's nothing wrong. This person could have been unemployed for two years and who knows why. It may have been the, this person may have had kids. It doesn't really matter.

But you make this resume is much stronger now. It's got two law firms on it clerkship and then they've worked at earners and young. And then And then just senior tax, you don't need a description of that. Probably the summer stuff isn't even necessary. They could list that if they want.

And then yeah, and then that's it. The pass USCP exam. New Jersey and New York. Yeah. Other than that, this is a good resume. So this resume can be drastically fixed. This person the way things are. They should be able to get a position in a decent middle market law firm, meaning not a huge law firm, but a good law firm.

And if they have some stability there, then po possibly move to a larger law firm. And then this is very nice to see someone from Taiwan ended up being, becoming a good writer and learning all these things, even though English isn't their first language and now they're litigation attorney in New York.

So that's one of the most important things. And the reason that this person didn't get probably a good job coming out of a federal clerkship is because there's not enough employment stability. But this transition from a tax associate to getting a job in a law firm is great and not easy to do.

So it's a very impressive resume. There's just not enough employment stability on it. And this person's next resume, they should do whatever they possibly can to stay there as long as possible because that's gonna be how they can move to their next employer. Okay. Let's see here. Business minor attorney.

Okay. Okay I'll go through this one fairly quickly. 'Cause this with a lot of things we've already covered. When other resumes again, you don't need this person doesn't need the summary at the top. This is a privacy attorney, eds all these different sorts of things.

They're a senior associate I'm assuming this is with a law firm. Let's go through here. Review and elevate junior associate research, drafting and diligence. So in most cases this can be partner ready issue spotting on breach exposure this and then different practice areas here.

So this is the same sort of thing that should be drastically shortened. So you would just take this and again, ask chat GBT to drastically shorten it. And then and then it looks like this person, their this first job. Is that what happened? Let's see here. 2018. 2019. Okay. A law firm. Okay, so this person, what I would recommend this person do is make them basically look like just privacy attorney here.

So privacy, so just, shorten this, which can be fairly easy. So shorten this and then shorten this. Shorten. And this really what they're doing here in this first job can be very similar. So all of this privacy experience should be shortened.

So you would. Literally you don't need more than one or two one or two bullets. People can catch on very quickly. And this is cool tech drafting teach contract drafting. Okay. Maybe okay. Con that's fine. Vice clients, yeah, so other, this is actually not a bad resume. And you can see here that the person's not telling you where they're admitted and things.
You don't need the skills here on this res part of the resume. You don't need an IP certificate with distinction or Cal awards three times. I guess you can put that. But now law review top 20% if you're magna cum laude, maybe people think that's a top 10% or 5%. So there's no reason to say that.

You can just say you're on law review and CU law, that's enough. And then this certified privacy professional, that's fine. But most of this is actually a pretty good resume. I like it. I think that it's very good for what this person wants to do.

Sometimes what I would also recommend is I don't know that it's a good idea for this person necessarily to, to make a big deal out of the fact that they're a privacy, they're a adjunct professor. 'cause it some, to some extent will detract from to, from what, from the fact that they are working in a law firm full-time. But you certainly can you could put, perhaps you could put other experience or something like that right here.

And then Variance. And then just list that, like that something other like that. And then this basically keeps the emphasis on that. But this is actually, I like this resume compared to the ones we've seen so far, especially the other privacy ones. I do like it.

I think it, it can be shorter and this is all this person really needs to make it into a good resume, just one or two lines. An employer can see this and have a pretty good idea of what the person does. There's a lot of stability. And this is interesting too. A lot of people got these jobs with Amazon and things like 2022 around them.

And yeah. And but if there's a way to make this person look more like doing privacy for Amazon, I think that would be helpful. Just to make sure that there's consistency. So you want the practice area to look consistent in terms of what I talked about earlier with with with a resume in terms of one practice area.
 

Resume Review Example: Privacy Resume with Better Focus

So this person looks like all privacy related here, then they're gonna be a very good privacy potential hire. So I like that. Okay. Certified discovery attorney with 15 years of remote document review. Okay, so you do, same thing. You take out Esquire you take all the stuff off the top. You take all of these description descriptions off of what you did.

Then you take off career highlights. Boosted reviewer speed by 15%. Okay, so one of the things too, everyone should remember is in terms of this stuff like review boosted reviewer speed, you don't need to come, people that come up with these percentages and stuff. It's probably not smart because how if I was a attorney cross-examining you, I'd be like, how did you determine it was 15%, blah, blah, blah.

And it would just, you probably wouldn't be able to defend it. Flagged a hundred docs missed in qc. Yeah, again, some of this stuff you should be flagging documents missed in QC all the time. But guests take that off. Experience. Contract attorney. Let's see here.

Jesus. Okay so what this person needs to do and it's not it's not a bad resume if they fix it all they need to do is they just call themselves a what do they want to be? A discovery attorney. Discovery attorney. Okay. Just call themselves a discovery attorney and right here. So you just call yourself a discovery attorney from 2010 to the present.

And then you summarize all of the all of the, quick summary of summary of the the discovery you've done that, types of discovery. That's it. So summary of types of discovery, and that's it. And just, you're familiar with these different programs whatever they are to do discovery and why you're fixing that.

And what you're doing essentially is you're and this is just a another great example. You don't wanna say all of these different employers you've worked at. You would just, you would summarize you could take all this information here and you could just say, can you summarize this discovery?

Can you summarize this person as discovery experience? And you wouldn't, you don't need to say you're a contract attorney. So lemme just fix this for you. Can you summarize this experience?

So I just asked chat, GBT to go in and very quickly summarize all this. And so they went and this is something everyone should do. You consolidate everything into a few lines and and then here it just says Project discovery and litigation Counsel.

I guess you can do that if you want. You can just say something along those lines and then that's all that's necessary. You just put this in everyone knows what that is. You don't need to list all these discovery, these staffing firms. The problem with listing all these staffing firms is if you list all that, it makes it look like, ma, maybe you couldn't stay employed with one.

Who knows? But you just make it much shorter, like that project based, I would just say discovery Council like this. I'm just, yeah, litigation Discovery Council, not project based. It's Litigation Discovery Council. And then you put the dates and yeah, that's it. Dates. So then you have that and then and then you have education and credentials.

You don't need that and say education certification, which is good. Certification. And then yeah, and then you're in good shape. Barbie, Georgetown Law Center. Okay, whatever. US District Core, you don't need that. Affiliations of recognition. Nope, you don't need that. All that can come out.

Yeah, this resume can be much shorter. So one of the things we just keep seeing here is people decide they want to put all these summaries and things at the top of the resume and highlight things that aren't necessarily that great. And so making everything shorter for people is so much easier than trying to do things another way.

Okay, let's see. This person acting United States trustee, April, 2008. Ling on bankruptcy and litigation assisting United States trustee. Okay. Other selected accomplishments? Let's see. Appellate coordinator, previous full-time positions selected publications. Okay. This particular resume I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on, 'cause I think we've done several like this already.
 

Resume Review Example: Discovery Resume

But essentially this person needs to do wow UVA and then. Wow, that's good education. And let's see here. Acting United States trustee. April 9, 1 18. Seven. Okay. What I I, I'm gonna basically, I tell, I'm not gonna go into a ton of detail on this one, but this person should be drastically shortening up this information here and April, 2004 to present.

And then same thing with these district courts and all this crap will apply for admission to other jurisdictions. Of course you will. So why wouldn't you? So you have to room that selective accomplishments. Okay. A lot of those things people law student honors program, appellate coordinator. Most of the time no one cares.

This person is a great applicant for a trustee type of attorney. But at the same time, I don't know firm dissolved. Associate attorney line in bankruptcy sections. Okay, so that's fine. So I don't know what this person wants to do. I'm not sure. But if this person wants to work in a law firm, then you need to fix everything.

So it looks like you chair borrows in bankruptcy. Okay, that's good. This, you need to fix everything. So to give any law firm that wants to interview, you have to give them some sort of some sort of thing to, to grab onto for whatever that is whether it's bankruptcy or whatever.

But when people are looking at your resume they're not necessarily concerned with the church you go to all of these board members and things. These are all very good. This is a very commendable resume. It's just the I don't know what is someone gonna hire you for?
 

Resume Review Example: Bankruptcy and Trustee Resume

So that's what you need to ask. And so whatever people and saying you're in the honor roll in college is not in 1984, is not something people are gonna be excited about. So you just, everything needs to present positions. Oh, okay. President. Yeah. Experience. So I don't know what you want to do, but you have to give an employer something to grab onto, and I don't know what that is, if it's being a trustee or bankruptcy attorney, but this is a great resume if you want to be a consultant but I don't know what else could be done with it? And this is an incredible career. A lot of real good experience, but but someone needs something that they can grab onto. Dual qualified okay. Qualified thing. Founder and principal operator. Management, crusade of consultancy and or an associate,

God. The Arts College. Okay. I don't know what this person wants to do exactly. But they say they passed the July, 2025 bar exam in California. Okay. Portuguese native

Okay, this is an example of this particular resume. You don't need to tell people at the top that you pass the California Bar exam or that you have a master of fine arts. The problem with this particular resume is it's like what does this person wanna do because a law firm isn't why would a law firm hire someone that hasn't gotten taken the bar in 12 years after they worked in New York?

This experience, is all. This is all relevant to, to, to this trainee and junior associate. You probably don't need that there, even a trainee and junior associate. Yeah, this person is a corporate attorney, which is nice. And they have pretty good experience doing it.

But they also took several years off from school after af after moving to the United States to work in a in a law firm for a year. But they haven't done anything in 11 years. So I think what I would do if I was this person is I would probably remove the most recent experience and I would just leave this if I wanted to get a position an employ, that type of position.

This person went and got a degree at California Institute of the Arts was a great school. It's very competitive, but at the same time, it has nothing to do with practicing law. And so why would you show things on your resume that have nothing to do with practicing law? Why would you want to go back to being an attorney if you took all this time off and didn't do that?

So that's one of the things that I would just keep in mind. What is the incentive of an employer to hire you if you've gone and done something else? And so a resume needs to look like you're committed to doing one thing. And this looks like you're not committed because you've been doing other things.

Why would someone hire someone that wants to do something else? And so this is a kind of a lesson that we talked about earlier today when we looked at some resumes and we saw there were a lot of people that wanted to do other things. And then the other problem of being from another country, just to be completely honest with you, is why would we hire someone with experience working in a foreign country and not here and instead?

That's just another kind of issue as well. But, if I was this person, I would probably JD and corporate I would probably, if I really wanted to practice law in the US I would you could probably get a job somewhere as a corporate attorney, like in a small market maybe in a small firm.

But it's not something that you look committed to. So I'm not sure if you haven't done it in 12 years, or 11 years, why would you want to go back now? So that's  a question that people are asking. And but you do have very good corporate experience. And so I would think a smaller law firm that's not getting a lot of applications, whether it's in Los Angeles, where you are, it's outside of Los Angeles or in a smaller California market, would potentially be interested in you.

Lawyer arbitrator humanitarian advocate. Okay. It's the same thing here. I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on this, but one of the things is you don't label yourself these things. You want people to conclude that you are a humanitarian advocate. Employers do not like looking at things that are like multiple colors and they don't like looking at these this, these summaries.

They they don't need to be told about your technical skills. They can conclude it. They don't need to be told about your achievements. They don't need to. And again, all these things could help you quite a bit, but this looks like a a foreign resume. And so this is not a resume US and it's too long.

And these, again, these kind of resumes are fairly common internationally, but not in the us Okay. This work experience kind, corporate council.
 

Patterns Across the Resume Reviews

Okay, so this next resume let's see here. And one of the things about most of the resumes that we've looked at today, and I think a lot of people that have turned in their resumes for review are. Like I said earlier, I think a lot of are people that are having probably a difficult time getting positions.

And I think I'm glad that we're looking at these because it can help people quite a bit. And because you're, most people are gonna be doing they're doing things wrong that are preventing them from getting positions. And one of the main things that I just wanna bring to everyone's attention that I think is very important that I've seen almost in every resume I've looked at today is, first of all, they're too long.

And again, a resume needs to be one page. Really, and almost every resume could be one page. The second thing is they bounce around between practice areas. So most resumes should only be one practice area if you can. Most resumes people are thinking they need to write down everything they've ever done.

And just keeping in mind that literally the better the pers, the better the attorney and the better the resume the less they need to say, people can say. I was a associate at baker Bots, great firm and I did corporate work, corporate m and a. That's all they need to say.

Everyone knows what that means. They don't have a lot of lines and things. Sometimes they may have a transaction sheet, but literally someone that was an associate there may have one line or two lines about what they did. And they went to Harvard Law School. They say Harvard Law School whatever, may or June of 2000 and 20.

That's it. They don't need to say they were on this association or that they don't put down that I was a member of the Muslim Students Association or the Democratic Club or whatever it is that they, or the Federalist Society. They don't put that, they just put that they graduated. That's enough.

You don't need to put a lot of information. And so that's a mistake that a lot of people are making in these resumes. And they're just almost like highlighting that they, you're, when you write all this stuff, you're highlighting that you're not you're not a attorney that's going to win cases or win transactions because you're writing, you're putting down too much information.
 

Resume Review Example: Plaintiff, Criminal, and In-House Resume

And I, again, I'm not trying to be harsh here with people. But these resumes literally show the type of training you have as an attorney because the or the drift you've had since you've been trained. They're showing the lack of training or the lack of again, the type of legal ability that the best employers wanna say.

So corporate counsel. So negotiate a settlement package with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the legal strategy. So probably don't need all of this information. Why would you need all this? I don't know, and state specific employment, like all this sort of things. Let me just tell you something that I just want to be very direct about.

So I started my career at worked for a federal district judge, which did, everyone does the same thing working for federal. And then I worked for law firm Quin Emanuel. And when I worked for Quinn Emanuel Quinn Take would do employment cases, they would do patent litigation, they would do commercial litigation.

They would do I don't know, all different types of litigation. Work at Quin Emanuel and everyone I was practicing with, top law schools and firm experience, they'd say they're commercial litigator. They don't tell you that they did 15 types of litigation. They, it's litigation. They litigation.

You don't need to say you did this and this. Someone that's a corporate generalist in a big law firm, they're not gonna say they did all these commercial litigation things and they're gonna say they were just a, or independent contractor agreements. They're just gonna tell you that they did corporate work.

So that's it. You don't need to say you did all these different things and W2 based contractors, like you just say you're a corporate counsel. That's enough that, that, that's it. You can say all this stuff if you want, but then you're just drawing attention to the fact that you think it's a big deal that you negotiated a commercial agreement when any attorney that's anyway cause now this person says they do high volume plaintiff's litigation. Okay. So this is interesting. And I don't mind that. And plaintiff's employment, litigation, okay. You don't have to say how many cases you did, you don't have to say all this stuff. You just never lost a jury trial.

But how many jury trials did you do? One, it's just no one. This is all you need here. Same thing and then here. Now this person's a criminal attorney. Okay?

Now this person's a in-house counsel. Okay? So now this person is a, what are they doing? I don't even know what type of attorney this is. I'm assuming. Oh, transvaginal mash and testosterone class. Action. Okay, so this person's a plaintiff's attorney. Again, Public defender, criminal defense. Okay, this is good. So I'm gonna go back and talk to this person in a second. No, you don't need to say you're admitted to the district court. That's fine. Claimant liars. Okay. Tallahassee Bar Association. No.

Okay, so I'll just start at the bottom here. Okay. So you don't need, when you're in, you don't need to say what you did. You don't need to say you were a member of the gamify. Now, all this stuff, no, no one cares or file for Delta. No one cares. And president's list, when once no one cares merit based honors scholarship to Thomas Cooley Law School, that's very impressive.

Good. So you have that. And then jury trial experience. I I've never seen that in the bottom of a resume, but I guess you could be, I don't think you need that, so I wouldn't list a jury trial at the bottom. Sorry. I wouldn't list that. And then here's the problem with this resume.

So this resume has all of these different positions, but it does two things. It has for 10 years as person was a plaintiff's employment attorney. And then for and then it looks like for another 10 years or so, they were, they did well, they did, they were a personal injury attorney. And then they were different types of criminal attorneys.

So all of this needs to be essentially you need to and I don't want to cut and paste this 'cause I'll probably show the names of the employers you're at. And I don't wanna show everyone, but you need to have this down to one page. And the one page will say something along the lines of, between these dates.

Actually, I'm gonna just make this one. I would just say I make this person, I'm gonna do this. I'm not gonna show the screen. I'm gonna do it. Can you make, can you create one line? I'm gonna put this into chat, GBT I'm gonna say, can you create one line or create one entry for this person?

And one employment entry. Employment entry that summarizes this person's experience. Since 2000, 2007 for resident. For Resident does not make that and I wish someone taught. The thing I'm gonna show everyone in a second about the problems with this resume and what's wrong? So here's what's wrong. So the person graduated, and this is very important and I don't want resumes to act like this in the future. If you fix these mistakes with your resume and you watch your career and don't make some of the mistakes I'm gonna show you that have been made here, you're gonna be in much better shape.

So this person graduated from law school in 2007, and all of a sudden, and after 18 years out of law school, they started doing a completely different type of career than they doing different type of work than they'd ever done before. They started doing NDAs and all these sorts of things completely unrelated to litigation.

So prior to that, all they'd done was employment, litigation and criminal litigation. But all of a sudden, after 18 years, they decided to do something different as if they wanted to throw away. 18 years of experience and learn a completely new craft, which is crazy. No, so that's the problem. And then they've been, then they did for 10 years they did employment litigation, which is great.

That's marketable. That could probably get lots of other jobs doing plaintiff's litigation. Now, you wouldn't call yourself high volume, you'd just say plaintiff's employment. 'cause why would you, high volume means lack of detail to matters. But then they did criminal work and but then they did this stuff, corporate counsel, like as unrelated.

So you, your resume should show some sort of continuity. And so this person went away from doing criminal to employment, but they're gonna be much better off if they look like they're doing just one thing. So here I would call myself in-house counsel. I wouldn't talk a lot about what I'm doing.

And then I would take all this out and then I would and then I would I would I don't know why this person's an attorney, an associate, a central general counsel partner. So they've got all these different things. And by calling yourself an attorney here, you're basically saying that you probably weren't an associate and why was this person an associate after having been a partner and all these different things.

And so the titles are messing you up the. The different practice areas are messing you up. Too much description is messing you up. And so there's just all of these issues and and here's what I did with chat GBT and I'll just show you real briefly and I'm gonna tell you why Chad GBT says this was a good idea.
 

Resume Review Example: Immigration and Advocacy Resume

It's sum summarizing everything into one thing, which is okay, like the way it's done it I'm not a big fan completely of this, but calling this person, calling themselves a senior le legal counsel and trial attorney is probably okay. Doing that. And Hispanic complex, I would say working in law firm that your nationwide journal advising managing hundreds of cases.
This person should, this should also be talking about working in law firm, but overall it's not a it's not a the way it's been done is not lemme make sure I got this chrome. Okay. Just Yeah. The way this has been done that way it did. It is not bad.

But again, one, trying to remember one practice area, not breaking things up, summarizing everything and making it much shorter can fix it. Okay. Chicago Kent College of Law.

here's another example. So no one cares if you got a labor and employment certificate from this law school. All of these awards public service, safe, far, soft Scholarship. Okay. Instead of Long Workplace activities. Jesus outreach Coordinator, no Dean's List Student Initiative.

Stop Ice raids. Okay. So we know what side of the fence you're on. Political, politically, self-help, law center all these things. Okay. One of the problems when people list all of these things on their resume and I'm just, again, I don't want to be mean here to anybody, but this person was on the dean's list for one, one semester and, and yeah. And the most important thing when you're in law school is your grades. 'Cause that's what gets you jobs. But this person, it looks like they were doing almost any, everything, a ton of things. And so they did a lot of different things, but they weren't they did 250 hours of community service and they got the Safeguard Shaw Scholarship.

I don't even know what that is. It's just Law Workplace Scholarship, Hispanic Lawyers Association, partial tuition Scholarship. So all of these law school honors and things aren't really relevant to how well you did in law school. And and so that's what's important. So people are most interested in that.

So again, I'm not trying to be mean here and I at all but. Most of this stuff is completely irrelevant to to what an employer is gonna be looking for. And some of it is related to politics, some of it ICE raids being a Dilly trip volunteer national Immigration Law student. All of this stuff, it's just, none of it is making you look exceptional.

And the same thing with the Labor and employment Law certificate. These are all good things. I'm not saying there's anything wrong, but if you want to get in a position, people need to be able to see what the person you are. Now, if you did get a labor and employment certificate and then everything in your resume was related to employment law, that would actually be excellent.

But it's all these different things so no one can figure out what you wanna do. They civil liberties, immigration, so this looks like a left wing type of person. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But at the same time you're communicating that and then Hispanic Liars Association great.

But that doesn't, what does that add to to what an employer wants? So jurisdiction means not claims processing. The seven circuits flawed approach to PAA. I don't know what that is. It looks pretty good to me if this is some sort of law review, so I would leave that on. I don't have a problem with that.

But all of this stuff needs to be shorted. So you take that. And I'm just, again, I'm not trying to be mean to people here, but this looks much better than everything else. Why would you say you got a 3.1 gray point average? That doesn't that doesn't move the needle for anyone, so people don't wanna do that.

Hispanic scholarship Students together are reaching success. Scholarship recipient? No. And Bachelor of Business Administration. And I hope, again, I'm not trying to be mean to people here, but yeah. Okay. Law offices of blah, blah, blah. Law clerk contract. No. Don't you, people should not be using the word contract and so forth on their resume.
Prepared immigration. Okay. This is fine. So this person was a law clerk. And what have they been doing since I graduated from law school? Okay.

I'm not sure that saying you were a law clerk for, oh. This was during law school for a month. Okay. I don't think you don't need to, I would not list a job that you did for one month. I don't think that's gonna help you. Intern law department. I think that's okay. Summer law clerk. What is the law department? September to April. Okay. That's probably okay. Okay. Summer law clerk 1999. Legal intern. January to May. Legal aid, immigrant and criminal rights. National immigration justice. Okay, so I'm gonna go back and actually fix a couple things.

So this person looks like they're interested in immigration law. So I would put this meaning this is about immigration, which is good. So you can put everything related to the immigration. I actually like now the Hispanic stuff here because this could help with a person's immigration. What, I'm not gonna spend a lot more time on this resume, but what I would recommend for this person is this person looks like they want to be an immigration or employment plaintiff's type attorney.
I actually like this now. I think it's gonna be okay. I think that but what I would recommend with this particular person would be you, either you try to focus it on litigation or you try to focus it on stuff related to employment. But it's an okay resume for that. I think that. Focusing on those sorts of things is gonna help you.

So if you want to be an immigration attorney, great. And I don't really have as much problem as I did with your, all of these things you were listing. So this could be a decent immigration resume. But again, if you want to be a immigration attorney, then you don't need to have as much information on here.

If you wanna be an employment attorney, most of the stuff should be shortened in my opinion, because you have this job as a legal extern, and you have all of this information, and yet then you have these, this other job. Here we, we're in complete summer with not as much. I don't do that.
 

Foreign Attorney and Law Student Examples

University of Berkeley School of Law, LLM. Okay. Yeah, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time in this one. Again this is a foreign attorney. And I would just bring to your attention that if you want to get a job in a law firm, it's probably not a good idea to talk about animal law and advocacy unless you wanna work with a work with animals and, and then study abroad. I see with 20 pleadings for two months. Okay. Yeah. Here, let's see what, Nope, this Indian resume. I can't opt out. See anything else? Okay, here we got one more. PhD patent examination past. Okay, good. Postdoctoral associate. Okay, so this is a what is this person?

I don't think this person's an attorney, so I'm not sure why this is here exactly. But can't help this person. Okay. Let's see what this person is. This is a law student. Okay. So we can talk about this person and then. Nick, we're gonna wrap it up after that, but I'll go over some things that we learned today.

Okay, so this resume is one page, which is great. This 2027, so it's what, 26 person's a second year. This person is a ghost of Fordham, and then they were prior to that, at Vanderbilt. So two grade schools. I don't think this person needs to list that they were a finalist for a scholarship or they had a mediation clinic.

So I'll take that off. And what else? Minor in scientific community Dean's list for two semesters. No so this is again, another example where you don't wanna list a lot of things that you might have done that were just two semesters of the dean's list is not that great incoming spring intern fall intern September, 2025 to present.

I don't know if this is a law firm but I would think you, you don't need all of this information. New York Supreme Court, same thing. Three months. Legal intern probably don't need all that. This resume, by the way is not bad. I don't think, I don't really have any issues with it. I don't know why this person's saying that they're oh, South Korea.

So they have a lot of experience in South Korea. Where at me, I probably wouldn't draw a lot of attention to the fact this person got a degree from Vanderbilt, then they got a, then they're in the law school. Putting all this stuff on your resume having to do with South Korea is probably not gonna help you that much because you worked I just don't think it's gonna help you.

Why is that? Just because and then these other jobs, you're welcome to put them on there if you want. And this resume's not bad. I don't really have a lot of problems with it. I think it's pretty much okay. It's just, this is a law student resume. But yeah, two one South Korea.

I don't think I don't have a ton of issues with this resume, but I don't know that I would put. This stuff about six years proficiency, I guess that's okay. Yeah, it's not a bad resume for what this person wants to do, but I personally would probably just this person wants to be a litigator.

They can leave it at that. But there's not a lot of I don't know that this information privacy helps. If you can try to get an idea of what type of attorney you want that might be more helpful, but, okay. Yeah. And law student resumes, you don't, they're not as they're not as important really as the legal, the attorney resumes.

The most important thing about. A lost student resumes is just not drawing attention to anything that is average in nature. So being on the dean's list is average being a member of a the whatever this mediation clinic and stuff is not, that doesn't add anything. And then I would also say that trying to convince, drawing attention maybe to the fact that you were working in Korea is probably not gonna help you that much because otherwise everything in your resume makes you look like you're a, an American.

I don't think that people are really gonna be that interested in the fact that you speak Korean or French. I don't think that or these, programming languages. Just a lot of things are being author or author authorized to work for any US employer. I just don't see the reason to draw attention to any of this now, drawing attention to or these programming languages, just, you never wanna draw attention to things that could potentially disqualify you from a job.

So people look at something and they think, oh, this person's not from the us so why would you draw attention to being Korean or this person? What are these programming languages? How are those gonna help you be a US attorney? So those are just some examples that could be helpful.

Alright, so I'm gonna just go over real quickly some of these rules and kind of things that we went over today. I think this was a a good a lot of things that we covered today I think are very helpful. But the big things that I would, that, that I would say for most of these resumes is a lot of times with a lot of these resumes today, it's like, what does this person do?

What does this person do? So we, we kept seeing that over and over again. We done, we, we couldn't a lot of these resumes, you, you couldn't even figure out what the person did. And what are some examples of that? The trustee, the you don't need to tell people all of these different things you do a resume.

People wanna see one thing. They hire one type of attorney. And if you confuse the reader, you're out of business. And that's one of the things I think that a lot of these people that was whose resume we saw today are probably having issues and they don't understand I'm putting, I have all these things, all this experience.

Why aren't people interviewing me and they're not interviewing you? 'cause I can't figure out what you do or what you wanna do. All these different things and so they just can't figure it out. And then the other thing we saw a lot in the resumes today is there's a lot of movement for some of these resumes.

Like they, the people are moving around and in too much. And so you summarize your resume in, you take all of your years of experience and you make it look like you you, you just create one block for your job. And that thing. So everybody whose resumes we saw today that were not performing high, probably weren't doing that well, was editorializing.

So you're telling people what you are and all these characteristics and things that's not necessary. You shouldn't tell the reader what you do. You shouldn't talk about working remotely. You shouldn't talk about being anything like staff, attorney. You shouldn't talk about all these organizations that may have nothing to do with their practice area.

You should never emphasize anything that makes you look average or below ag average or not strong. So we saw this last resume. We looked at maybe the one before that, talking about how someone had a 3.0. Dean's list a couple semesters, like that's not good. Associations, meaningless awards all these sorts of things.

Experience non substantive things. So you never emphasize, just pretend like you're an attorney representing yourself. You never want to emphasize things that are average. You wanna make your client look as strong as possible. Federal district court, I don't know why everyone keeps listing that.

Everyone knows anybody can wave in. And then the resume, the ages. There were some older resumes 'cause of that. And frankly, there is a, there is, if you want people to hire you, you're always gonna be competing with younger people. It doesn't matter the industry. It could be legal, it could be accounting, whatever.

It's always harder to get a position when you're older. So you might as well just be honest about it. People also are often doing things on their resumes that that are detracting. So we saw some pro bono stuff today. Not a lot. We saw some experience that you know, a lot of things that were not related to the person, what they're currently doing.

One of the things I didn't like, what we saw a couple times today is we saw people that mid career or 20 plus years in, are all of a sudden switching practice areas. And typically this goes for everyone. You want to pretty much choose your practice here pretty early on in your career, like probably within at least the first two to three years at the latest.

And because that's what people hire people that are experts in a practice area. And if you're switching practice areas when you're 15 years in. Then you're starting essentially from zero political politicizing your resume. So I, again, all that stuff can hurt you. People want specialists and not generalists, so it's important to remember that like I talked about a little bit earlier.
 

Final Resume Rules and Takeaways

And then making sure that your resume is one page. And so you don't need to tell people if you say you're a litigation attorney, you don't need to tell people what litigators do if you're whatever type of attorney you are. If you're a corporate generalist, you don't need to tell people what corporate generalists do.

You just, that's it. And and if you make things easier for the reader, you're gonna get a lot more jobs than you would otherwise. And again, the best resumes are very direct. The best resumes don't have a lot of detail. The best resumes let people read, make conclusions and attorneys hire other attorneys.

Unless you're going in house where you know, someone doesn't know what they're doing, but attorneys hire other attorneys. So attorneys are the ones that are reaching conclusion to buy a resume, and you don't need to tell them what that is. When an attorney gets a resume, by the way. They will look at it and they'll, but they're, they know that most attorneys, if they're good, can figure anything out.

And so they don't, you don't need to show people that you've gotten this experience because just having experience doesn't make you a good attorney. What makes you a good attorney is your ability to to figure things out, to spot patterns, to be thorough, to reduce the complicated arguments to something that's easy for people to understand to whether it's transactional or litigation.

Thank you everyone for being on this today. I think hopefully everyone learned a lot. I do have a bunch of resume articles and I've written a couple books on the stuff that I will send out to everybody after this. And again, like this stuff is huge again, making, fixing a lot of the things that we talked about today.

And any resume will drastically increase your odds of getting hired. And I commend everyone for watching this day. 'cause I know it was a ton of information and it's not always the most interesting thing looking at other people's resumes. But at the same time if you're, if you were taking notes and you were listening and getting the sense of what we did here, you'll drastically, often 10 times or more increased your odds of getting position.

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About Harrison Barnes

The Architect of the Hidden Legal Job Market

For most lawyers, an attorney job search begins with public job postings, law firm websites, and job boards. Harrison Barnes knows that the best opportunities are often found elsewhere—in the hidden legal job market, where confidential firm needs, quiet practice expansions, and customized roles are never publicly advertised.

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About BCG Attorney Search

BCG Attorney Search matches attorneys and law firms with unparalleled expertise and drive, while achieving results. Known globally for its success in locating and placing attorneys in law firms of all sizes, BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys in law firms in thousands of different law firms around the country. Unlike other legal placement firms, BCG Attorney Search brings massive resources of over 150 employees to its placement efforts locating positions and opportunities its competitors simply cannot. Every legal recruiter at BCG Attorney Search is a former successful attorney who attended a top law school, worked in top law firms and brought massive drive and commitment to their work. BCG Attorney Search legal recruiters take your legal career seriously and understand attorneys. For more information, please visit www.BCGSearch.com.