Transcript
Description:
A resume for an attorney should focus on the skills needed to be successful in this position. Experience outside of being a lawyer is not as necessary, and it does not have to take up such valuable space in your document. In this video, Harrison Barnes disapproves of including your non-legal experience. Here are the reasons why:
- Don't include any non-legal experience in your resume if you're looking for a legal position! Doing so will just leave the hiring manager wondering why you haven't been practicing law.
- Non-legal experience includes hobbies, volunteering at a nonprofit organization or school event, and so forth.
- Even if the position is related to another field outside of law, such as academia or business, these positions should be listed in "Other Experience."
- You might be able to slip things like this occasionally, but never do more than one or two such sentences within your work-life overview. Because doing too much may give off ambiguity about whether or not you can commit yourself solely to the company you are applying for.
Transcript:
Okay. Let's see here.
Okay. I like this resume too best litigator or wow.
Okay.
All these activities and stuff aren't really necessary. I wouldn't be very careful about all these pending states. And also saying your pending in the U S PTO, unless that's what you want to do. Let me see here.
I would be careful about these other bar states. Because then it's going to show you don't necessarily know where you want to work. I would be careful about the PTO. You can put the PTO on your resume, but if people see that in your applying for jobs that aren't P PTO related or, don't require patent the patent bar, then that's going to hurt you.
I don't understand what the Seattle university school of medicine stuff is. It would be one thing. If you went to Yale for medical school or you but I don't know, you worked at, you just did a program there in the summer. And then you went to university of Wyoming. So I I think it's great that you went to Yale for a summer, but I don't know that it's necessary to go on your resume.
And then
I don't think you need to say this is pre-medicine. I can say it, you can say honors program, but I don't know if you can say even going to see a pre-medicine and MBA, the problem with all this stuff is when you start leading people away from. Looking like what you want to do. There's nothing wrong with doing pre-medicine.
It's great. You have to make sure all these typos and stuff are fixed, but
and I'm sure this was a competitive thing to go work at. Yeah, but I don't know how necessary it is. If you can just work there in the summer. Okay. Now we're getting into professional experience. You graduated in 2020. Okay. So you've been working, who's a consultant.
Yeah.
Guess you got out of school in January, 2020. So you haven't been in a school very long and you took the Illinois bar. And then you worked while you were in school. I think
Oh, I see. So you graduated in 2006 and then you went to, after that, then you took all these jobs.
So you have two things, you have legal experience and non-legal experience. And so what I would recommend here is you really need to get all this non-legal experience and throw it into somewhere else. It just needs to there's too much going on. And this isn't a problem. The, a lot of people have in the resume.
It's like this resume right here. We know what this person does there, our contracts team leader, that's all that's all the resume says. And it's great. There's nothing, that's perfect. We know exactly what this person wants to do. Same thing with this person is works for.
Regular monitors of tier one banks and then writes about it. So we don't know what you do or what you want to do. And that's the big problem. Like you have to be able to like, hear talks about, I started reading this and was like, wow, this person's an incredible litigator. They've done that.
They're going to be a great litigator. I'm going to get into this. And I see MBA and I'm like, where the hell that come from? And then I see Yale school of medicine. I'm like, what's going on with that? And then I see all these bar exams and patent bar. So I don't know what you want to do. And so the problem is if someone does, and then I see this judicial law clerk last summer which was great.
And then I see innocent project and then I see this, so all that's fine. But I think you need to have a separate set. You need to basically have legal experience. And then all this stuff here is in Texas and all this non-legal experiences also in Texas. So what is the connection to all of these other areas?
And I would just, I would come up with a few lines about what your other experience was prior to law school. And then, board member, all this stuff it's just, it's overwhelming. So again, like the big thing that I think I want to show everyone here or tell everyone here is, that you need every resume.
And I think one of the things that I see when people have problems is, people need to be on the set of something like, so you need to put people on that. You need to put the reader of your resume on the center of something. And here it's I want to be a business person. I want to be a doctor.
I was trying to be a doctor. I look like I'm a litigator. And now I look like now I want to, now I'm taking the patent bar and getting admitted in 15 different states. I don't know what's going on. And I'm just like, what the hell? And I'm not seeing anything wrong with that. But at the same time, you need to put people, you need to decide what you want to do.
And if you want to be a litigator, then you need to dumb down all this non-legal experience and do that. If you want to be a corporate attorney, then you need to, figure out how to do that. But you have to put people on the set of something and this resume right now in which maybe a lot of the resumes you know yeah, is doing a lot of different things.
Now, if you don't want to be a litigator, then you probably should, you have to dumb this stuff down, but you need to be the, you in order to get what you want, you have to appear like the person you have to appear like a certain type of person. And and that's just the way it works.
And and I'm not saying there's anything wrong being a board member and all these things. I actually think those are really good, but but that's, this is in where is this in Texas? So what I mean, why are you in Illinois? I don't know what's going on, so why don't you take it into Illinois?
And all these state bar admissions, you can just stay active than Illinois and then so people need to have something, cause I, I can't make any sense of this. I don't know if you're going to want to work at a company. I don't know if you're going to want to work in a law firm. I don't know, what you want to do.
And so that's the problem. So I hope you know, and this I don't know there's a lot of improvement here to other stuff, but again, everyone that's with your resume, it's like the big, one of the big things I would say to everyone is, we do a resume shows employers keyboard system,
And to
employers,
there's a certain box.
Now there's nothing wrong with being a Renaissance man or woman and that sort of thing. And having all of these different, great experiences you've had and begin, I can get, you can see all this stuff needs to be here for you, what you need to fix. All of this stuff, there's nothing
there's nothing wrong having all these experiences and what you've done, but you need to you need to point people in one way. So this resume honestly, would be much better. They have a wish just as if it was just the university of north Texas, best litigator award this person this, and this.
And and then all this stuff gone. I hate to say it, but it's just, and then maybe, and you don't have to be a board member. You can just be a volunteer and you don't have to I said there's a lot of good things about this, but again, all this stuff here is pointing people in a different direction than what this stuff is.
And so you need to do that. And and I almost would, just put the MBA looks like you want her to do something different that than going to law school, it looks at Karen sure about it. And and so it's just, you have to worry about that.