A career in law is both rewarding and intellectually challenging. Practicing law also offers a certain level of prestige and high earning potential.
Due to the diversity of legal practice areas, deciding what to include and omit when writing your law school resume may prove challenging. And if you’re recently out of law school, you’ll also have to write an attorney cover letter.
We’ve reviewed numerous law school resumes to find what works and distilled what we learned into these five law school examples.
Whether you’re applying for a full-time staff attorney role out of school, looking for your first internship, or anything in between, these proven law school resume examples will help you get your next legal position in 2023.
Why this resume works
- Nothing impresses hiring managers more than quantifiable metrics. You can demonstrate your impact in previous roles by adding numbers to your law school resume.
- Metrics don’t have to be complicated, nor do they have to be 100 percent perfect. Include rough estimates regarding how much you improved efficiency, how many cases you worked on, or how many issues you resolved. The numbers are there—all you need to do is find them.
- Whether you’re still in school or have recently graduated, you have the opportunity to include an objective on your resume.
- An objective is an optional section that describes your skills and enthusiasm for your future role. Always customize this section for each job you apply for by including the employer’s name and the role you’re seeking.
Why this resume works
- You want hiring managers to see a clear career progression, so it’s best to format your law school student resume in reverse-chronological order.
- Reverse-chronological order is simply putting your most recent experience first. Usually, this means employers will see your most relevant experience first.
- If the job you’ve most recently held isn’t related to the position you’re seeking, that’s okay! Simply highlight transferable skills (preferably any keywords listed in the attorney job description).
- Whether you’re looking for an internship or your first full-time job in law, there’s no excuse for silly mistakes like typos or grammar errors.
- Before hitting submit, always check your resume for errors and inaccuracies. Make sure you have one full page of content; don’t leave too much white space!
Why this resume works
- When writing your post-law school resume, don’t give in to the temptation to add a laundry list of skills in your resume’s skills section. A hiring manager would rather hire someone who is a master of a few skills than barely proficient at many.
- Only include six to eight skills you would be comfortable talking about in an interview. If you’re not experienced with a particular skill, leave it out.
- Want to further demonstrate your skills? Include the same keywords in your skills section in your work experience bullet points.
- Better yet, include metrics like reduced client wait time, increased client numbers, or the number of cases you tackled to show you’ve got the right qualifications.
Why this resume works
- Your law student resume may be formal but shouldn’t be devoid of personality. That’s when you should consider using a resume template.
- Using a fun resume template can make your resume pretty and help you structure your content, keep it to a single page, and even make it easier to read. Plus, you can adjust the template as needed to suit your needs.
- If you’ve started any clubs or have other legal experience that you wouldn’t quite count as a “job,” you can include it in a dedicated “Projects” section.
- In this section, focus on what you specifically contributed to the project. Were you the founder of a club? Did you lead any community initiatives? Whatever you contributed, show off your leadership abilities and unique skills.
Why this resume works
- Hiring teams don’t spend long looking through resumes, especially if they have a big stack to go through. That means your goal is to keep them reading your law student recruiting manager resume. So how do you do that? Happily, you can follow several resume tips to make your resume easier to read!
- Numbers naturally break up the text and are easy to spot, keeping eyes on your resume longer.
- Section headers are an industry standard, but you can improve readability by putting them in bold and adding some color.
- Keep your bullet points short and sweet. Limit them to no more than three lines, and start each one with strong action verbs.
