Transcript
Description:
This is a helpful video where Harrison Barnes shares his insights on enhancing the attorney resume that will help you land an interview. Below is a guide to making a detailed but short resume:
- You don’t have to put your address on the resume.
- Education information should be at the end.
- Under your education, you do not have to say “Graduate.” Just the name of the school/university and the date will do.
- No need to say attorney at law.
- Instead of Professional Experience, write “Experience.”
- Shorten the details you write under your Experience. Add only the relevant and summarized ones.
Transcript:
Okay. Let's say Lucy Brantley another made up name. This address is weird. Maybe we put that into, to protect a person's identity, but You don't by the way, have to put your address on your resume.
The address on the resume can be problematical because sometimes like LA is a huge city. It can take, I'm in the West side of LA and some people are like, that are, we have an office of Pasadena. That could be an hour and a half commute. So if I was applying from where I am to a position in Pasadena, I probably wouldn't want to say where I live.
So you want to be careful this person, by the way, the reason they have this address is because they have their own firm and they're probably in a like a Regis or something from that C address today, receive mail. Okay. So let's see what this person does. This person does all these different practice areas and they're solo practitioners.
This particular attorney Got trained by David do Crow. Okay. And then has had a couple of other worked at a couple other places and then also worked in house for awhile. This is an interesting attorney. They are see here they have pretty good experience. It looks like they have their own practice as a generalist.
If this person's applying for a job. The first thing I would recommend is I don't think the education belongs to the top of the resume. So you always want to put that at the end. I would take off the date and I would put the date. I would make sure that the dates on there, and I don't think you need to say graduate of the university.
You should just say university of Minnesota law school and then the date. And so this information should really go at the end. And then and then professional experience. You need to call it professional. You just say experience. You always want to just, anytime you can shorten things like instead of seeing education and training and we'll say education and and then this sort of thing this, person's obviously an attorney, so you don't need to say attorney at law, you just put it like that.
And then and then you probably need to take off. I would take off the address if you don't need it. Unless you want to tell people where you live, but and you can put your address on resumes, the way she's applying to someplace at Santa Monica. That's great. But this is the way I would do that.
Because she's done a lot of different things. The biggest thing you want to, the biggest thing, by the way that a law firm is going to care about when they see a resume of someone that has the wrong practices, how much money? Yeah.
I was, I couldn't believe it. I have this person that I met it was just by chance I was selling something and she showed up to inspect it for a friend. And she was a, she's a young girl. That's been in a law school for about 10 years. And she went to Southwestern law school and Los Angeles.
And you wouldn't believe it. She has a $20 million a year immigration practice. $20 million. I couldn't freaking believe it. That's $20 million that she's bringing in now, her profit margins on that. Aren't huge. So there like maybe 10 or 15%, but she's still, she's making a lot of money. You ask how much money do you bring in.
And so if this woman has a firm that's bringing in $20 million a year, every big law firm in LA. Pretty much not everyone, but a good number of them will talk to her. So law firms are always interested if you have your own firm, how much business and how much you're bringing in. So that information, if you ever, have it, it should be highlighted because if I saw that on this and that, even if it was 1 million or 500,000, it would jump out to me and I'd be like this person's interesting.
This particular resume needs to be focused. This person does Contracts wills trusts personal injury, all these different things. If she was a family law attorney and had a lot of experience just doing that, she would be marketable to family law firms. She's probably not going to be marketable intellectual property.
If she just does a wills and trusts, she is going to be marketable. And and those are the, so you have to think about what is the percentage of stuff that you do because the more stuff you put on your resume and the more experience you have. The more likely you are to be a generalist.
And the more like you look like a generalist, some more like you are to work at a smaller firm. And so law firms typically the larger the law firm, the more they want to hire a specialist. Okay. So let's see here board member. This is all good. Volunteer mediator. I don't know if the Sojourn has that sounds good.
The heritage Senator for yeah, these are, I like all these professional affiliations. Those are actually good. This I, to the extent you can, I would, most of this would be it needs to be shortened up what we've talked about the whole time. And then you really want to shorten all this experience up and to the extent you.
Out how big your firm is or the number of cases you did and so forth the better off you're going to be. And this looks to me like this person has a lot of family law experience, which is very marketable right now. I don't know why so many people are need family law attorney, but remarkable practice here.
So to the extent this person can, I would do all. Never get to stuff like reversed overhead by two to $4,000, analyze this stuff doesn't help most of the time and , it's just not really good. And then you also make sure you go in and you can see that you need to proofread this and use software on it so forth because this is how a resume looks when I download it.
And if I see all this stuff, I'm assuming that the person, have this could have experienced so forth. May not be the best attorney. I don't like these lines and stuff too. I just distracting. Th the more you can get towards something like this, it's very simple.
And in a way from all the detail the better off you're going to be. Okay. So I'm going to let me see here. I'm going to do This is webinars running long. I don't want everyone to get too spaced out. So I'm going to do a couple more resumes and then I'm going to take resume related questions that people have.
And then I will probably also record more resume. I'll probably I'll try to do a couple more resumes but I'm going to take resume related questions after I do this resume. And then and then we come back and then I'll come back and take resume related questions. And then I'll survey people and see how they feel about maybe continuing this review next week, too.
Okay. And then I also did want to do cover letters next week, so I don't know. We'll figure this out.
