How to explain your legal experience before you rewrite your résumé

Before you spend an afternoon rewriting your résumé, make sure you can explain the work behind it.

A phrase like 'commercial litigation experience' may be accurate, but it leaves a hiring team with several questions. What kinds of matters? What did you handle yourself? How much support did you have? What industries, with what types of clients, at what volume?

Getting those answers clear makes the writing easier. It also helps you decide whether a role is a reasonable next step and what you need to ask before pursuing it.

Here's a practical way to work through that.

Start with work you can describe

Choose a few matters that reflect the responsibilities you want in your next role. For each one, write down the general type of matter, the stage you worked on, your contribution, and the level of responsibility you had. Keep client names and confidential or privileged facts out of the exercise.

Be specific about your part. Drafting a motion, preparing the supporting research, and arguing the motion are different responsibilities. A reader shouldn't have to guess which one you mean. If you worked with a partner, explain what you owned and where their review or direction came in.

Public job descriptions can help you see the level of detail a firm is asking for. For example, this mid-level litigation posting with Finnegan, identifies responsibilities such as managing discovery, taking depositions, drafting and arguing motions, and supporting trial teams. That role has specific patent litigation and technical requirements. The useful example here is the level of detail: a candidate can see what the firm expects them to have done.

Use a verb you can explain in an interview

Once you have the example, choose the wording that accurately describes it. Observed, prepared, drafted, negotiated, argued, managed, and led each give the reader a different picture. Use the one you can support when someone asks you to walk them through what happened.

Trial experience deserves particular care. Preparing a case for trial, supporting a trial that actually took place, and handling an arbitration can all involve meaningful work. Describe the proceeding and your responsibility clearly. If a matter was resolved before trial, say what you did to prepare it rather than leaving the reader to assume you participated in a trial.

If your own notes are unclear, go back and clarify them before improving the prose. Better wording won't resolve an unanswered question about what happened.

Connect transferable experience to the actual role

If you're changing practice areas, start by looking at the tasks in the new role. Then identify where you've done related work. Drafting agreements, coordinating diligence, negotiating terms, and managing closing requirements may give you useful points of connection. Explain those connections with examples and name the parts of the practice you would still need to learn.

Rinke Noonan's commercial real estate and business transactions posting illustrates how specific that assessment can be. It identifies several relevant transactional backgrounds, while making clear that commercial real estate experience is strongly preferred. It also acknowledges that a candidate may not have experience in every area of the practice.

That gives a candidate useful questions to ask. Which responsibilities would you need to handle independently at the start? Where could you develop with the team's support? Another employer may answer differently, so don't assume one firm's approach applies to the next role.

Do a final check before you send it

Read each important claim with four questions in mind: What did I do? At what level of responsibility? What kind of matter? What would still need to be verified for this particular role?

If the answer is buried, bring it forward. If you're relying on a broad label, add the example that makes it clear. If there is a gap, be ready to discuss it directly and ask how important it is to the employer.

You don't have to fit every detail of your practice into a résumé. You do need to give the reader enough accurate information to understand the fit and have a useful conversation.

Enjoy getting more, better, interviews!