Transcript
Description:
One of the most competitive fields in law is that of military lawyers. As a lawyer, it can be challenging to stand out among peers who will go toe-to-toe with you for every case and client opportunity. When preparing for your attorney resume, make sure you speak up when it comes time to tell the hiring manager what sets you apart from other candidates vying for the position. The following are some of the suggestions from Harrison Barnes based on the resume in this video.
- Use regular and simple fonts. It is best not to draw much attention by setting it to bold.
- Barnes opposes using a PO Box as your address. If uncomfortable sharing your actual address, better off leaving it out.
- A typo can hurt your application. Ensure that you proofread or use grammar-checking software.
- Too much information confuses people and could potentially be used against you.
- Include only relevant information. Be very direct with the details and describe what you are doing.
Transcript:
Okay. This particular person's resume. I do not like this font. It's funny. It looks like the person, actually, I was thinking like a jungle war when I saw this. Cause it looks kinda like military and nature this particular resume.
But with this font, you typically want to go to regular fonts. I don't like PO boxes. And I'll tell you why I don't like PO boxes and I'm going to be very blunt here. Every, when I was every time That I haven't every person that I've ever known which isn't a lot, there's three or four people that has done something illegal that I've encountered in my legal career and gone to prison, always used a PO box.
So I just, I understand there's reasons for using PO boxes. I'm not saying that there's. Any reason not to. And I certainly know people that use PO boxes, but it's just it's just kinda like you're hiding the ball. You're not telling people, where you are. You're better off just putting nothing out there.
And just saying, because people know you live in Puerto Rico based on where you are at. Oh, commissioned officer, cause that's why there's a military thing there. That's fun. Again, make sure you look, you fix the spacing and and this sort of thing. And then let me just see a notary Republic.
Is this person an attorney? Okay. Okay. Let's see here, Texas state. I remember. Okay is find alpha again. I guess you can put that on there. A lot of people have done that, but I don't know that it's necessary.
Okay. Yes, it looks like another resume hamper. Here is this okay. This another resume without vape. Okay. Okay. So yeah, so this particular resume the stuff about being a notary Republic is probably not going to help you get a position so that, if you're not a Republic that's not practicing law.
So I would probably just remove that and make sure you have just the stuff up here. What you'd been doing from 2000 to four, I would take this off. I would also take this off. And look at this professionals misspelled. So these sorts of errors, by the way, are they're not they're very serious.
I had an instance once where I was interviewing with a law firm through cruder and and the recruiter had retired my resume. And for some reason I don't know why they did that. I don't even remember and
Anyway, they had retired my resume and they had made a S they had made a a typo and that law firm was ready to make me an offer. And and then when they after that happened they found the typo. They actually pulled the offer. And then the recruiter had to be like, listen, I retired to, re you know, so that was a problem.
So you need to be very careful about typos and stuff in your resumes. You just, everyone needs to run the stuff, their software. Then after running things through software, you need to be. Very careful about how you do things and then this If this person is a solo practitioner, that's great.
So the family and civil litigation criminal, there's nothing wrong with being a generalist. So I would just put down, a couple of lines about what was done and leave it at that. You don't need to put a lot of information. And then this is where the person got training. That's fine too.
So just leave it at that. And then I don't, I think a lot of this bolting stuff is probably done by. Our software when it converted everything, but try to use the same font consistently and then shorten all this. And then and then former commissioned officer.
Okay. Yeah. Managing millions of dollars of military equipment. Isn't really relevant. I'm looking at this resume just from the standpoint of being an attorney someplace. And and not necessarily what other types of jobs Hertz person could do. But I would do things like this.
I would change the font and make sure that the font is consistent. So an example, you can tell much better. It's going to look up. And then and then there you go. You don't want too much of the personality to come through, even though this person is a a military type person. It's kinda cool to have the military font.
You still want to make it look. Is normal as possible. And then once you've done this, it's going to look a lot better. And then a lot of this language too, by the way, the problem, when people start writing a lot is they show their the th they opened themselves up to criticism.
And so everybody here needs to be cognizant of, like, when you're writing a resume open yourself up to criticism. So different attorneys are trained at different levels, like some of the best attorneys out there, but look at the stuff I write and they would be like, this guy has no fricking idea what he's doing.
And I look at people's writing and do the same thing. And you just have to be careful, but if I'm looking at this, I'm thinking supervise a team of three paralegals and other legal personnel to ensure productivity. Obviously, what else is, but so there's not really a need for that.
There's not a need for that, and that has nothing to do with anything and develop and maintain relationships. That's great. For what I mean, did you get business and design budget, should they were met by a dairy farm? No. Yeah, so most of the stuff is unnecessary. Just you just wanted to, basically, this is all you need really. This is going to be much more powerful than this. And then again, all these underlining, all this underlining and stuff really needs to go. And you just you don't really need all this bolding and this
Yeah, pro bono. Most of the stuff needs to go. So this attorney and this person has a lot of experience. So this person, in court numbers could probably run circles around the majority of people on this call. It's just, they haven't put their experience down correctly. And they've emphasized things that aren't necessary, and this stuff, PR USA I would just, would just put, I don't know that you need you might want to just put the location but you don't need to say USA.
There you don't spend on say New York USA, so you just need to think through how this stuff has done. And then this is actually pretty good. Like these are describing the work that you did. Problem, again, anybody that's a military attorney that's on this call, military attorneys continually.
People in the military, learn to write learn to speak and think in a certain way. And I think it's probably a good way for the military to teach people because probably a very good, but you just need to be very careful about too much information. It's just, if you. If you put too much stuff there, it confuses people.
And if you have different fonts and stuff, it confuses people and things. You want them to look just very simple and and you need to break through all that. And and I hope everyone on this call, so far understands that, everything, people put too much information and when you put too much information, it gives people stuff to use against you.
You want to just be very direct with things and then describe what you're doing.
