Description:
Harrison Barnes has a few suggestions about this attorney resume he is reviewing in this video. The usual one that he notices for each resume is adding the GPA information. He approves placing it there if the grade is outstanding, but if not, it is better not shown there. Here are his other suggestions to improve this resume:
LinkedIn Profiles – Barnes is not against it, but he has seen people getting disqualified for them.
Society Memberships – Adding this will show the importance of this membership to you but not the employer reading the resume.
Transaction Sheets – Most patent attorneys know what they’re doing, and they’ll look at it in a lot of detail. Including a separate attachment with the transaction sheets or representative patents will help.
Transcript:
Okay. So when I look at this Okay. Matrimonial navigator program. Okay. So to me it looks like this person wants to be a they want to be a hopefully, I'm, if I'm right, I could be wrong. They want to be a family law attorney. And sometimes when people put things like sports, entertainment, law society on there I just these kinds of things are really unnecessary. They, these societies and stuff, it's like they have a couple of meetings, a quarter per semester.
It's just a lot of these different foundations stuff. Aren't really that necessary. What is good here? What I like is I like the Kaplan bar representative, because I think that shows that this person is trying to, earn money to get a free bar course and also out there and social, I like this family court law review stuff.
I don't know what this grade point is. But if it's good then if it's like the top, third or something, then that's good too. But again, just keep in mind my pre previous advice about that. And then just watch your your your things here.
I don't know this Ruth climate award. Oh, I guess you gotta, he did really well in history. Okay. And then the Brooklyn college historical society. Cause that's fun. The sorority you can take that off or leave it on. I don't know. I didn't know that Brooklyn college actually financial vice-president.
Okay. I think as a general rule it's gonna detract from your strength. If you put stuff related to all this on a therapist and I don't like how all this is formatted at the top, so I would trying to figure that out. But so you know, other stuff needs to be better organized.
I think honestly I think it was probably, it goes over here. I dunno. It's just Yeah, but you have to figure out that organization just a little better. Okay. But then let's see this law group, or you're a law clerk. I would love it. If the this work you were doing as a law clerk was related to something to do with family law.
Cause you've been doing this family law court review. If it's not then that's fine, but you don't want to, because what the problem is people get a scent of a resume. Like they get a sense of where things are going. And and so when you, anytime you, you pull up, anytime someone has a resume, they the person reading it is going to get a sense You know of the kind of person you are and your interest.
And so I want to be able to look at a resume and get a sense of the person's trying to do one thing specifically. So here you are doing basically plaintiff's employment-related work here, you're doing You're doing employment discrimination. Cool. Okay. So this is all employment discrimination.
So this is actually good. So this is two things. So instead of this family court stuff here I would be just very careful. I would I would try and I would take this GPA off for now. We can talk about that in a minute. But expect expected grad expected to graduate in the top half, whatever, something along those lines.
But people aren't necessarily going to be as concerned about your grades as they are you and
put activities you can reduce. I don't know, but let's just talk, let's talk about that. So this is all plaintiff's employment discrimination. Discrimination
discrimination, same thing here.
And then it's going to also plaintiff employment discrimination.
Okay, so plaintiff employment, discrimination, employment discrimination. Okay. So then yeah, so that's actually pretty good. And then I don't know why you have this underlying actually the bulb and at the end of the line plaintiff discrimination, plaintiff employment discrimination. Okay. So maybe just, just, you say something along the lines of, I interned at this employment discrimination related law firm and, did these things and this stuff and.
Just kinda, live it, leave it at that, but this, when you have the resume that looks like this way, as opposed to the way it was before then you can say, I have a deep interest in plaintiff employment discrimination, and then what makes that so strong is when someone's looking at your resume, they're going to say, does this person this person Did they want the job and it looks like you want the job because you're doing plaintiff's employment discrimination.
So if you're applying to plaintiff's employment discrimination, you're going to be very strong. And and how to tell if you want the job. Because you've been doing it and you like it, and then you can also say will they do the job? Long-term yes, they probably will because they're doing plaintiff's employment discrimination right now.
And then and then can they be managed? Yes, because they've been doing it. And can they do the job? Yes, because they've had this employment stability during school. So this person actually, I liked this person because they they did this for four months and then they did this for they've been doing this for, it looks like how many of us was that five months?
And this is actually very good. It's all plaintiff's employment discrimination. So maybe talk a little bit about what you've done there and that's it. And then and then just that's it, that's all you need. And then this person's graduated in 2021, so they're graduating soon. And and if it was me, I would apply to employment discrimination type jobs.
And then I would just say you can talk a little bit about your grades there if you want. And then this stuff here, just clinical summer fellow, this is not related to plaintiff's employment discrimination. So I would take that out. I would just say you're a fellow and then I see this as a summer. Fishing. Fine. Just take this. Not related to plaintiff's employment discrimination. Okay. And this is fine too. So this would be other I'm going to find is this sentence this times, new Roman. So let's put everything in times. New Roman.
Okay. And yeah. So all of a sudden you have a very good resume. You have to fix all this all of these thanks here. But now you look like a you look more like a What you may want to do now, if you want to do other things, that's fine. Then you would take off you would basically described if you wanted to do criminal stuff, which you did here, the, or you've want to do veteran's clinic you would do it there.
And then if you wanted to do something different, you would do it here. So these are just the summer jobs you had, which is fine. And it's good that you got experienced during the summer. And that's great. And I would try to and I think this resume is actually much better.
I think you do need some discreet discussion about this. If you want to put your full into Russian that's fine too. There's probably a lot of Russians that need people to do Employment discrimination or you may not want to put it. It's up to you.
But that's how I would do that. So everything needs to be focused. Now, the other thing is if you want to do family law, then you could just, then you suddenly, you put all your family law stuff back on the under your law school. And then you talk about. And then you don't say anything about plaintiff's Plymouth discrimination and you just talk about that you're a law clerk, and then if you want to do criminal law, you you would, or whatever type of law you want to do, you would, if you just want to do litigation, then you just say, worked on litigation related cases.
There. And if you want to do defense litigation, you just say worked on unemployment matters. So you have to think about who your audiences for each of these resumes. And unfortunately, a lot of people that are looking for jobs, don't think through things like this. And unfortunately most people that are putting together the resumes and thinking about them are thinking about them this way, but this person could be depending on what they put on the resume could easily, I think, easily get a job.
Job plaintiff's employment discrimination. If they do what I'm telling them. But they could also get a job doing employment defense, depending on how they say it, defense because they were on the family law journal. They could also get a job doing family because of the germ. They highlight that.
Because they did the veterans stuff. They could probably also get a job in the government. They want it to working in the veterans office or something, bathrooms that's government,
government stuff they wanted to do. What else could they do? Veterans started doing the government stuff if they wanted to do. Government if they want to do litigation engagement, they can do that. Just talk about about litigation related, experienced experience, did if you motion, discovery and just don't highlight the fact that it was all employment discrimination.
So all of this is. And then you just change this around you just talk about employment work, you'd say, or you'd say, litigation related, work, prepared pleadings and did discovery or, and then if you wanted to do regardless, whatever you want to do, you can pretty much get it in there and that, that would help you quite a bit.
So that's how I would handle that. I don't, these kinds of summer positions are okay. But Yeah. I don't think you, you, again, you want to leave people with one sentence about what you do. So every resume that we've talked about today we tried to give people a sense of one thing.
So you want to look like one thing. And the reason is because when people have jobs, almost every law firm they're looking for a certain type of person and and they want to hire someone with a certain type of experience. And the more experience you have related to. A certain area the better off you're going to be.
Okay. So let's look at this next person here which this was a B, and maybe for you. Let's see. Okay. So this person okay. The same kind of thing here. I don't like putting LinkedIn profiles on my resumes. Just the reason is this is just as a general rule. I like LinkedIn, by the way.
I'm not a, I have no issues with LinkedIn, but anytime I've seen people disqualified for them. So I see more people just qualified from LinkedIn than anything. So anytime you give someone a reason to reject you, someone, a reason to reject you, they will. To reject you, they will. Resume is like a paper.
So when you write a paper like for college or law school or something, typically what the reader does that they read it. And then if they find issues with your paper they will Mark them down. Like this was wrong. And the person removed, emerges on scape. He gets an a and the person that emerges with all sorts of things wrong has a problem.
So just like we talked about when we talked about these kind of long paragraphs, when you're talking about your experience, like that can really hurt you and sent you back very far. And so you need to be very careful about, not putting in. Super long paragraphs and so forth into your descriptions because that, that can definitely hurt you.
So I don't like to LinkedIn, unless you feel like your LinkedIn is perfect, but your LinkedIn may look like your other things doing other things. I may see you have businesses on the side. It may say, they may not like you, they may not think you have enough connections. They may not, like your picture.
Who knows? You just can't make this stuff up. And I don't like the stuff about Riverside Illinois, state bar general bar Just put down your phone number, that's it. You don't need to hide anything. People. There's no reason to hide anything. These are employers, you're trying to connect with people when you're applying for a job.
You're not trying to hide behind something. And so you want to be very very careful about anything you possibly can do that would alienate someone and make it look like you're hiding something from them. You just don't want to do it. It's just, you have to be careful. Okay, so let's take a look at this and this is good.
This person's admitted to the patent in bars. This I can tell you right now that whoever this person is a very employable person. And I will tell you why in a second this is a great candidate. We'll get lots of jobs. No problem. Probably less time out. I may miss something, but yeah. Let me see here.
Good candidate maybe not in Illinois, if that's where they are. I don't know if they're in Illinois because that's not the greatest market for what they do. Okay. So university of Notre Dame law school again, I don't think this person is a patent attorney I don't like any of this, so I don't think you need to put them in court. The person's a patent attorney or board member. That's not really anything. I was a board member in moot court and everything. I literally forgot about it the day after I did the, it's not important intellectual property loss, psych, and non-important anybody that's putting these societies and stuff in your resume.
You just want to be careful because the reason you want to be careful is because. Everybody knows that, these societies are just kinda, there's really nothing to them. They're just, people get together and they say, we're in the society. It's just, it's this is obviously a leadership position and this person was the vice president, but I'm not sure how important it is.
I'm not sure, listing you certainly, if you want, you can list these, the number of different ethnic groups and so forth. That's fine. But I don't think that any of these things aren't necessarily they're not necessarily achievements or anything. So I don't know if I would put those on again with a jury with a grade point average, some law schools at 3.36 would put you in the top 5% other law schools.
It's just put you in the top 50% Notre. Dame's a great law school. That may be a top grade from there. I don't know. But I would be careful about that. This is a great honor. And obviously if someone were to give me half of the tuition, I would have been very happy in law school and I certainly hope it didn't merit it, so that's fine.
But if you can get us, if someone got us a scholarship, that's very good. Okay. This is awesome. These are great grades. The person had Got all of these awards and fellowships and so forth. This is great. This is a very strong candidate in in electrical engineering and so forth.
And these are great. This is a great background. I don't see anything wrong with this at all. It's a super and Again, I don't know that this this is necessary. The society of professional engineers. You could put that on there, but it's probably not necessary. And in terms of these great points th these are all good grades, by the way.
I just, I don't, I don't have anything to measure them by. I typically, when I see like grades, I like to see really good grades. And if there's not really good grades, if people ask about them and it comes back, This is, I think a three two's all A's and B's so that's great.
Same thing with three six or whatever this is, that's pretty much all A's. They took good grades. But you don't necessarily need to do all the sorts of stuff. So this particular resume Is again, needs to be you can see here all these problems, like sentence fragments and all this sort of stuff I'm here.
So it needs to be cleaned up a little bit. There's also a gap in employment, which isn't that big of a deal especially in Chicago, as a patent attorney, because it's very difficult to get patent attorneys there. I probably would this person, what this person is doing is actually very good.
They're talking about medical imaging, neural networks, video compression. So I probably, if it was me I would th and then here they were doing patent litigation and then they did patent types of things, I probably would prepare a if it was I would prepare a transaction sheet or, represented a patents and so forth and try to put all this into a separate attachment on the resume and and at the end.
And that's how I would deal with that. That to me would make more sense. Especially for patent attorneys, you can just say representative patents and so forth. Most patent attorneys that are reading this stuff, know what they're doing and they'll look at in a lot of detail and we'll go we'll understand it.
So you just need to be careful. And again, the more you write you can see here I just want to say you can see here, like all of the all the things that I could possibly go through here and crack just on this one program. And this is Grammarly and there's other grammar programs.
You just need to be very careful. So I would like it if this was a much shorter. Cyber to take off this is a good resume. I really have no problems with it and I might even let this I probably, I don't like this part here, but I probably would let this second part pass if it was, if I was looking at this person's resume but you can see here.
Yeah,
yeah. Chapter responses, career paths. That's, there's just a lot of stuff here. That's not. Necessary, this really needs to be short down. So I would probably yeah.
Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff here that this person's done. Which is very good. And But I do think this just needs to be shorty quite a bit. This is my opinion. And I would this is a good resume I would and this person is employable and will probably be employable their entire career because of the focus of what they're doing.
But most patent attorneys, I would have up a transaction sheet at the end. These are all good firms. Nobody's a good firm for summer associate. This, these are good firms. And I don't think you really need to do much you might want to put one line here, but I would I don't think you really need a lot of information about what you did other than, you can have it here.
And if you receive an offer as a summer associate which you okay did then you probably don't even need to put this security. You probably need to put dates here. So you would go something like this summer associate. Dates and the dates and then and then also after that associate, so that's how I would do that.
And then see summer 16. Yeah, that's fine. And then all this stuff over, going over to the London, Notre Dame three. Pre-launch experience engineering trash now in general I wouldn't tell a patent attorney or most attorneys to put, I would really want them to be emphasized their experience before going to law school.
But here I'm in because this person is a patent attorney. I really would probably want that on there. I don't think it's a problem. It's actually cool because it just shows their long-term interest and doing patent related work and so forth and and that's perfectly fine.
Yeah, that's how I would do that. And then obviously this person is admitted at the Pat bar. So I don't think you need to have that. You might really, this is probably enough. You could probably also say other experience because this person has been doing this for so long.
So I might just say other parents.
And then something like that former engineer with
electric truck and so forth, he would write out, just do, write it, write this up real quickly. And then and then you wouldn't need to, even then you could fit all this on one page or engineer with general electric. Okay.
Okay.
I would just say July, 2010 to 2013 or whatever the dates are. And then and then you could, after that you would just, and then you could say a little bit about what you did and then and then just go to skills and interest, and then you're done. And then as an attachment, you would have your experience that you did you would have some information about patents and stuff that you may have read.