Transcript
Description:
In this video, Harrison Barnes shares his experience on not proofreading his documents and why you must proofread your attorney's resume before submission. You don't want to miss any typos or errors that can lead to the wrong impression about you. Proofreading your work will save time and frustration when others read it to decide whether they should hire you as an attorney. A few notes to consider are the following:
- Proofreading is essential to avoid errors and typos
- It can help you present a more polished image of yourself
- You'll also show that you're detail-oriented, which will be necessary for the job
- Proofread your resume to make sure it's free of any mistakes or misspellings
- Make sure there are no grammatical errors before submitting your resume
Transcript:
One of my first job out of law school was working for a federal judge. And my first week there, I or maybe my first couple of weeks, I wrote a motion for him or, an opinion and the opinion was maybe 40 pages long. And and and I thought, more texts is better.
It's better to really, do an exhaustive argument and so forth. And and meanwhile, my co clerk was writing things that were four and five pages, and he was perfectly happy with them, but I was very interested in the subject. Matter of everything I did. So I was worked really hard, but I'm not necessarily the smartest knife.
So he called me into his office. He's can you come into my office? And I went in and he had two doors. He closed both of them. He sat down and he was mad. His face was red. And he said, look at page, 16 or 26 or something I looked at. And I said, what, what's the problem. And he pointed out that I had misspelled a word that and it was the word was misspelled because my spellcheck hadn't caught it.
And it was the wrong meaning. It was, I don't know, like T H, G R instead of. T H E I R or something along those lines, your T H R E it's a stupid error like that, but he was very upset about it. And he's this is unacceptable. You can't be turning in work like this. This would make me look horrible.
If I've turned this, I put this out in public. And at the time I was like, this guy's a fucking idiot. He must he's so up high this is how I thought about it. There's something, he's got a screw loose. He's more interested in, style over substance. But the thing was, is because I had to keep my job and because I knew how important it was.
I started aggressively proofreading my stuff, so I would spend. Half of the time, or, maybe 30% of my time was writing and then the other 70% was polishing things and making sure it was perfect. And the result of all that was when I got into practicing law, all of a sudden, like I started turning a new work and I was way ahead of my peers.
So when I got into a law firm everyone wanted to work for me and liked my work. And and I did very well. And and when I left that clerkship job I still thought the guy was like, a freak about details and stuff, but then, years later I wrote him a letter when I realized how much she'd help me, because I realized the importance of really doing a good job with this stuff and making sure that everything is perfect and you're not going to catch stuff just with this grammar software, by the way.
I recommend using a couple of different things, but when you turn in a very good work and you don't make errors, then you're going to get you're you have a very good chance of getting positions. And and I had another thing that was very interesting to me happen. Then I been practicing law for a year.
And there decided I wanted to lateral to another firm. And I sent my resume to someone that was sending my resume on. And I said you just changed my dates of employment and right in the right dates. And they were off by a month. And the law firm codon almost didn't hire me. So this type of stuff is, these errors and tight language and all this, all these sorts of things really make a difference.
And so people can look at your resume and they can tell immediately what kind of attorney you are and the more you're writing. And if you don't feel up to par, like you're a really good attorney and you don't understand, and you're doing things like I certified to the best of my belief and knowledge of, this is just not this kind of stuff yeah.
On a resume like that. And so you just need to be very careful and you need to keep your language very tight and not make too many errors, not say too much because the more you say, the more you the more you the more you're exposing your weakness. I didn't know that and then I should, I think I do know actually, but I didn't know the Thomas Jefferson lost its credit accreditation or got it back or when it was, no one told me that now.
I know. And is that a good thing? Probably not. I certainly, when I was in school I've never went overseas or anything like that. Frankly, I couldn't afford to. Is that something that you want to put on your resume? I don't know. And then all this stuff, you have every resume here.
Part of the problem with a lot of these resumes is you don't realize who you're speaking to. So if you want. If, if you want to talk about Harvard business school and you're trying to get a job as an attorney, that's probably not a good idea. You want to leave with all the legal stuff you're doing and you have to have a resume that reads like somebody would want to see in a law firm.
They need to believe that, you want to do this stuff. So this is the, one of the, some of the mistakes that a lot of people are making here. And I'm in these tight spacing issues and all this kind of stuff. So you guys really want to make sure with your resumes, that you're, you have to prove them.
You have to you have to shorten them down and realize no one cares, no one cares about all this stuff. Like they know for the most part, if you go to a certain place, you're going to be doing a certain type of work. And and so they don't really need all this detail.
And then when you start listing things that really aren't that significant as your experience and in that that can help you hurt you as well. Okay. I'm going to take a, it looks like we're making pretty good progress at least today. So I'm going to take a break from maybe two to three minutes.
And when I come back we will get through hopefully a lot.