Helping others navigate the legal system is your passion. It drives you forward when managing caseload intakes, filing visa applications, and preparing petitions carefully during your work as an immigration paralegal.
But are you preparing a resume for your next career move?
Your work assisting others in the immigration process can be life-changing, so let us assist you. Our immigration paralegal resume examples have helped many people land a job in the legal field, so using them as a template will help you portray your skills successfully.
What Matters Most: Your Immigration Paralegal Skills & Work Experience
The immigration system is tricky to navigate. It can feel like jumping through a detailed obstacle course as you work quickly to file the correct paperwork and get everything done to exact specifications. It’s critical to show you have the necessary skills to help clients in this process.
When choosing resume skills, look for the law firm’s specific needs. For instance, if the firm specializes in immigration from El Salvador to the US, your bilingual skills in English and Spanish and your knowledge of the legal systems of both countries would be invaluable.
Here are some of the best skills for immigration paralegals to include on a resume.
9 best immigration paralegal skills
- Client relations
- Legal writing
- Microsoft Office
- Case file strategies
- Bilingual or multilingual
- Immigration law
- Docketwise
- eImmigration
- LawLogix
Sample immigration paralegal work experience bullet points
Once you’ve established your top skills, you’ll want to show how you’ve used them in the legal field.
With all the detail you put into documents like visa applications, you should have no problem whipping up some awesome examples here.
The key is to make your impact clear using numbers and concise information. Think about the number of positive impacts you’ve had on clients and even the daily things you do that go unseen, like tediously gathering research to help case files go through. You’ll soon have some ideas about what to include.
Here are a few examples:
- Helped clients prepare immigrant petitions (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3) with a 70% success rate in obtaining visa approval.
- Spent over 200 hours researching case strategies to increase petition success rates by 32% in 1 year.
- Used Spanish-speaking skills to help clients with the onboarding process, leading to a 40% increase in efficiency working in the client’s primary language.
- Integrated a new case management system using LawLogix that helped increase processing speed by 20%.
Top 5 Tips for Your Immigration Paralegal Resume
- Use action words
- In the immigration legal system, you’ll often need to take action quickly. Using action words like “created,” “drafted,” and “integrated” can all make your work on things like naturalization applications or H-1B petitions seem much more impactful.
- Combine technical and interpersonal skills for more impact
- Immigration paralegals help others through complicated processes. Including things like how you assisted over 100 clients in preparing case adjustment status provides a more significant impact showing how you work successfully using interpersonal and technical skills.
- Aim for short and impactful descriptions
- Hiring managers make a first impression on your resume within six seconds. Concise descriptions, like one sentence on how you managed client files with 99 percent accuracy over five years, can go a long way to show your abilities.
- Proofread thoroughly
- Accuracy is paramount in immigration law. Just like you wouldn’t want your L-1 form getting rejected for a simple filing error, you need to be just as precise to keep your resume template professional and precise.
- Use your cover letter to work together with your resume
- Only so much can fit on a one-page resume. Use your cover letter to fill in some extra details about how you’ve executed PERM processes or what makes you passionate about helping others through the immigration legal system.
Paralegals looking for one of their first jobs in the legal field may benefit from including a resume objective. Listing a few sentences about how you’re a driven paralegal with 3 years of experience with PERM processes can go a long way to help you stand out.
You can show how your education or previous work experience has equipped you to perform legal work. For instance, referencing a class project where you did an investigative report on old immigration cases and prepared motions and memos can help.
You can stand out by including experiences that are highly specific to the position. Anything from how studying abroad in college helped you learn about working with others from different cultures to knowing how to use appropriate software like eImmigration can help you build a good resume.
