Lawyer Resume Guide

Legal hiring filters in a specific order: can you practise, in what jurisdiction, and in what area. Everything else is read afterwards, which determines what belongs at the top of the page.

Bar admissions first

Directly under your contact details.

Bar admissions: Colorado, 2019 · New York, 2021 · Admitted to practise before the US District Court for the District of Colorado

State every jurisdiction with the year. If an application is pending, say so with the sitting date. If you are awaiting results, say that too, since firms hire on that basis routinely.

This matters more than in most professions because admission is jurisdiction-specific and a firm cannot consider you for work you cannot perform. Standards and requirements are set state by state, and reference material on the underlying framework is maintained by resources such as the Legal Information Institute.

Practice area, named plainly

Immediately after admissions, in a headline.

Commercial litigation · Complex contract disputes and business torts

Legal hiring is highly specialised, and “attorney with broad experience” reads as unfocused rather than versatile. If you genuinely practise across two areas, name both and lead with the one matching the posting.

The matters list

The substance of a lawyer’s resume, and the part with real conventions.

For litigation, give matter type, forum, scale, your role, and outcome.

Brennan & Ochoa LLP · Associate, Commercial Litigation · Denver, CO · 2021 to present

• Second-chaired a three-week jury trial in Denver District Court in a $12m breach of contract action; handled two expert witnesses and the damages case. Defence verdict.
• Drafted and argued summary judgment motion in a business tort matter, granted in full, disposing of a $4m claim.
• Managed discovery in a multi-district matter involving roughly 400,000 documents and eleven depositions, supervising two associates and a contract review team.

For transactional work, give structure, size, your role, and outcome.

• Represented the buyer in a $65m asset acquisition of a regional manufacturer; drafted the purchase agreement and led the environmental and employment diligence workstreams. Closed Mar 2025.

What makes these work: the forum or structure, the size, and your specific contribution. Not “represented clients in a variety of commercial matters”, which describes the whole profession.

Confidential matters are described generically without naming parties. That is standard and expected.

Outcomes should be stated where they are public. Where a matter is ongoing, say so.

Do not inflate your role

Legal hiring verifies more thoroughly than most fields, and the hierarchy is well understood.

Second-chairing a trial is second-chairing. Drafting a motion that a partner argued is drafting. Supervising document review is supervising document review, which is legitimate and valuable experience. Describing any of these as leading is transparent to anyone in the field and it ends candidacies at the interview stage.

The convention that works: say exactly what you did, in the field’s own vocabulary, and let the scale of the matter do the rest.

Law school details stay longer than elsewhere

Legal hiring weighs academic credentials more heavily and for longer than almost any other profession.

University of Michigan Law School · JD, 2019 · Class rank: top 15% Michigan Law Review, Associate Editor · Moot Court, semifinalist Judicial clerkship: Hon. A. Nwosu, US District Court, District of Colorado, 2019 to 2020

Include class rank, journal membership, moot court and any clerkship. A clerkship in particular stays prominent for many years, since it is one of the strongest credentials in the field.

For candidates further along, education compresses but the clerkship stays.

Resume or CV

A point of genuine confusion in this field.

For firm and in-house roles, you want a resume: one or two pages, selective, targeted. For academic legal positions and some judicial applications, a CV is expected: longer, complete, with publications, presentations and teaching. See the CV format guide.

Sending the wrong one is a visible error. Publications belong on a CV; on a resume they get one line if they are genuinely notable.

Additional sections worth having

Publications and speaking, briefly, if relevant to your practice area.

Pro bono, which is genuinely valued and often omitted. Name the matters and the outcome.

Languages, with an honest level. Valuable in immigration, international arbitration and cross-border transactional work.

Bar and professional activity, such as committee membership.

The O*NET profile for lawyers is a cross-check on general occupational vocabulary, though the field’s own conventions matter more.

Format

One page early on, two once you have matters worth describing. Plain, conservative, single column. Legal is a field where a designed resume counts firmly against you.

Use a professional template and check the document against a specific posting in the resume checker, since large firms and in-house legal departments use the same screening software as everyone else.

Check the BLS wage statistics for context, noting the extremely wide spread across firm size, practice area and geography.

Related

For adjacent professional roles, see the HR resume guide and the finance resume guide. For senior positions, see the executive resume guide. For the CV distinction, see the CV format guide. For the same treatment applied to other jobs, see resume examples for other roles.

Browse the professional templates or build one free.