Law Schools

Don't EVER Lie, And Other Useful Résumé Tips

A résumé that is to the point, honest, and shows a bit of your personality can be the most important sheet of paper in your job search.

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Ed. note: Please welcome Nicholas Alexiou back to our pages. He will be writing about the importance of the law school career services office, and providing some tips and tricks for law students.

Well hello again from Career Services.  Today, we are going to discuss the one document that will likely be a part of any legal job search, from summer associate on up, the résumé.

Ideally, your résumé distills your entire academic and professional career, with a bit of your personality, down into a bite-sized piece (i.e., a single page) that any recruiter, employer, or LinkedIn stalker can review quickly and subsequently have a good sense of who you are and how you might fit into their organization/fever dreams.  But it is important to note that despite the ubiquity of résumés in both the legal world, as well as general professional life, there are compelling arguments that résumés can be subject to, and in fact further, our unconscious biases.  It is an important issue for the legal industry as a whole to tackle.  However, as a career counselor, my job is to help students and alumni obtain employment in the world as it currently exists.  Therefore, here are some important things to remember when drafting or revising your résumé.

Perhaps the most controversial résumé topic is length. I will keep my advice here relatively short: yes, as noted above, your résumé should be one page.

Okay, maybe a bit more detail is necessary.  To paraphrase the late, great, Molly Ivins from her 1991 critique of Camille Paglia in Mother Jones (later used by Charlie Pierce in his review of Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball), you are not the cosmos.  Your existence is not the alpha and omega of human existence, so you do not need to present a novella to a legal recruiter, who might have 30 seconds to scan your résumé, walking him/her through the intricacies of your life from birth up to that exact moment.  You might think your stint tending to the cash register at a pizza place in your college town was unique, thus requiring a half-page explanation.  It does not.  You might think that you are justified in having a three-page résumé because your stretch at the GAP was so intrinsic to your legal career that you need a full page to explain how you folded sweaters.   You are not.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that my current résumé (regardless of your current employment status, you should always have an updated résumé at the ready) is over a page, but there is a simple explanation for that . . . I am an only child.

DO NOT LIE ON YOUR RÉSUMÉ.  Look, I understand that embellishment is something that will happen on a résumé.  If you previously worked for a member of Congress, “liaised with constituents” sounds much better than “fielded telephone calls from cranks.”  However, there is a world of difference between embellishment and outright fabrication.  Not only is lying on your résumé fundamentally dishonest — a trait that, despite what popular culture might tell you, is not what most employers are looking for in a lawyer — it will eventually catch up with you.  This comeuppance might not happen when you are applying for your first legal job, but the last thing you want to hear when you are up for partner is, “So, about your R-o-a-d-s Scholarship to Oxford that is listed on your résumé.”

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As for the structure of your résumé, an education and work experience section are standard, with the amount of time since you have graduated law school determining which of those will come first.  Foreign language skills?  Definite inclusion, though fluent does not mean you took a year’s worth several decades ago in high school (see supra, the section on lying).  For those of you who have already graduated, definitely include your bar admissions.  References can probably be on a separate page, but if you are a 1L looking to fill up space, go ahead and include it on the main document.

There is perhaps no section that causes more consternation than a personal section.  Typically, this section, where an applicant shares a few of their interests, this can be seen by employers as a valuable insight into the makeup of their future colleagues or a complete waste of time.  I lean toward the former for the simple reason that unlike a lot of corporate opportunities, when applying/interviewing for a legal position, be it in Biglaw, government, the non-profit sector, or elsewhere, you typically are not going to be evaluated by the VP of Human Resources whom you will never see again, but rather, you are going to be talking with your potential future colleagues who want to know who you are outside of your Con Law grade.  When that evaluating attorney is stuck inside a conference room for 72 hours straight trying to close a deal, they want to know that the person next to them might be able to kill a couple of minutes talking about college basketball or a book they just read as opposed to their in-depth thoughts on the dormant Commerce Clause.  If you do include a personal section, be specific.  Saying that you “like to read” is completely useless as you have merely announced that you are literate, something that is typically inferred by your enrollment in, or graduation from, law school.  What do you like to read?  The collected works of Jane Austen?  Delightful.  World War II history?  Every male law firm partner over the age of 60 will want to hire you on the spot.  The writings of Charles Manson?

A résumé that is to the point, honest, and shows a bit of your personality can be the most important sheet of paper in your job search.

Oh, and for the love of everything that is holy, no typos.

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Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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