Everyone needs a quality professional resume. But for attorneys, the resume's style may reflect more on the job candidate than it does for most professions. As president of a career counseling and resme writing firm with many attorney friends, I know that a legal resume must meet the exacting standards of hiring law firms. Attorneys looking to make a career change must demonstrate through their resumes that they are detail oriented.
Be sure to avoid these common traps that plague attorney resumes:
Excess Qualification. Attorneys tend to write defensively, an important skill for success. But a resume must be sharp and concise. Focus on Previous Duties. Your experience matters, but your successes matter more. The firm won't hire you because you can do the job. It will hire you because you do it well. Typos. They're bad in a brief and poison here. Many firms will chuck a resume from an attorney with a single spelling or grammatical error.
Like all professional resumes, yours needs to highlight your accomplishments. Your most important accomplishments can have a dramatic quality: problem, action, resolution. You can describe the difficulty, what you did, why, how your action helped, and what it meant. It's one thing simply to say you increased operating profit 35%. It's another to say that the firm was facing a crisis, revenues weren't increasing, and you solved the problem. You underscore the impact.
But don't overdo it. If you describe your accomplishments in excess detail, the resume can become unpleasant to read. You can also appear to be laboring too hard to prove yourself and the resume can suggest poor communication skills. Ironically, it can imply that you are not effective.