Transcript
Description:
You can see in this video that the attorney resume Harrison Barnes is reviewing appears not to have a lot of employment stability. Barnes fixes it to focus the resume on a specific practice area. These are the modifications he makes:
- Bar and Certifications are placed at the end instead of the top part.
- Grade point is unnecessary unless you did well, like top 3rd.
- Remove descriptions of irrelevant work experiences.
- Eliminate work experience that you currently are in but less than three months.
Transcript:
Okay. So here's the next resume of this person. This is quite a crew sticking around for all days. This is amazing. And we will take another quick break maybe after this resume. Okay. So staff, attorney cause this person okay. So let me tell you some issues with this resume. That right off the bat. So this person they can put, you put, I'd like to put the bar really at the end.
That's fine. And the certification at the end that's fine. So I would recommend doing that. So you always want to put all this stuff here, at the end as better I recommend I'm interested to hear Toma Okay. So this person has been a staff attorney for just started being a staff attorney right now.
So I don't know that that's necessarily something that I would want on my resume right away. So the problem is with this person is first of all, I w I don't know that I would list the The grade point because I don't know how a three, two, I, when I went to law school a three, two would have put you like in the top 20% of your class probably were when I was in school and then they changed the later.
But I, I don't know. That that's a good idea to to put your grade point, unless you did really well. So I would, but you might want to put it out there. If it's a good, if it's a top third or something, you're welcome to put it, but I don't know that it's needed. What I don't like about this resume is I don't like that that there's a lot of movement, so you can see that.
This person that graduated from law school in 2019. And they did all this other stuff here. They worked for IBM, but not for three years. And then they were a law clerk. Yeah, so I don't know. No. There were some associate at a company and they they were doing insurance defense as a litigator for.
Nine months. So there's not a lot of employments spill it. Now, a lot of people may be shocked by this, but this is actually, this is how things work a lot for a lot of people in the Bay area. There is a lot of turnover there compared to a lot of other places. So it's not necessarily.
A bad thing, but it's not something that I always think is a good idea. So right now this person is doing techno technique check transactions at M and a, and then before they were doing civil litigation and basically litigation for nine months. And then here, when they were summer associates, they were doing Basically commercial agreements, NDAs and so forth.
So I don't think all this information here is necessary. I don't think all this information here is necessary. And then if this person was a software manners and that's actually interesting employers like that, and they did that for three years, so I probably would put prior experience.
Here. And then I would go like this. And do something along those lines. So it shows that I would take off this pro bono stuff. And I would put this certification and and I would probably take off this stuff here. I don't know that you need to list. I don't think I would list the fact that I'm a staff attorney right now.
I might list it like in three months on my resume that I was doing that the problem is if you. If you If you start listing the fact that you're a staff attorney, that's going to potentially hurt you when you're looking for a job because the law firms are gonna assume that you're not necessarily interested in a full-time job.
And there's a pecking order between staff attorneys and real attorneys. So you may not need that on your resume for a couple of months, unless you're, I want to do that. But the problem with the staff attorney job is you're doing corporate and here are your prior experience with litigation.
If you come across as someone that looks like they can do nothing but litigation that's going to help you much more. And then this shows you had employment stability after college and so forth. And and this good. So I, if it was me I don't know, or you've only been doing this job for a month.
I, I probably would lead with this. And and have it more like this. And then I would apply like crazy to jobs, doing anything to do with litigation and and and you don't really an insurance defense and you will get jobs very rapidly. Now you may be interested in Yeah, the job you have a Fenwick and West, and actually be a better job than the one you had during insurance to pets.
But if that's up to you, if you want to keep that on your resume, you certainly can do other jobs. Once you have that. But law firms, the problem with staff attorneys and so forth and there's nothing wrong with being a staff attorney and everyone, but they may believe that you won't do the job long term.
You've already switched practice areas. So you're doing a different practice area now. So they they may think you might be managed and all sorts of things. So if it was me and I was trying to get it, I would apply to every from doing insurance, defense related work that I possibly could.
Or if you were applying just to. If you wanted to focus just on litigation you could say just instead of practicing civil litigation focused on insurance defense, you could just say practice civil litigation practice, civil litigation, so many times you're better off doing that practice, civil law, civil against represented clients clients
Something along those lines. Yeah, by the way for people that are litigators. If you want to get a job in a an if you're doing insurance defense and you want to get a job in a litigation firm then you really want to take out references to insurance defense. If you want to get a job in an insurance defense firm you can leave in references to insurance defense.
So you just need to be careful. The more you say about the insurance, though, the more you're only going to get hired. By insurance people. And so you need to be very careful about that. And and so you need to have this person, if I was this person, I would probably have two resumes.
I would have one for a insurance defense. I would have another for for litigation and I would probably even have honestly I would probably have one for construction defect is a very powerful, popular practice area right now. So I would do something like this when I was applying to construction defect jobs.
I would put this at the top when I was applying to. General commercial litigation jobs, I would make the resume, look like this. And then I was applying to insurance defense jobs. I would have to do other things. So this person can get several jobs. This is a marketable attorney. They just need to learn.
If they just need to fix the resume and make it look good, this is good here too, because this has makes it look like the person has some employment stability. I liked this resume. The problem with this privacy certification is that having this and I would just put it admitted to the state park, California, the bottom, our missions.
Yeah,
something along those lines and there you go. So then all of a sudden, the resume's much shorter. It's focused on what the person does and looks a lot better. And then you can put the name and so forth at the top and you're in a much better shape. Excellent. All right. I will take one like a two minute break and be back and we'll get through more of these.
Thanks. Okay.
