Learn this lawyer lingo:

IN-HOUSE COUNSEL:

This term refers to lawyers whose employer is an entity (such as a corporation or organization) that is not “in the business” of providing legal services to clients. In-house counsel typically serve one and only one client: their employer.

I must have seen more than 100 law-student resumes over the past year. Often I see them after a law-school career office has reviewed, and after everyone thinks the resume is “final.” Here’s the problem:

I still catch formatting errors and see other obvious areas for improvement.

Here are 3 fixes for every legal resume:

Every year when law-firm recruiting season starts, law students start buzzing about the enormous starting salaries at Big Law firms. (It’s $215,000+ in NYC now, I understand.)

A heavy dose of reality is needed.

At my 10-year high school reunion, I spoke with a classmate who’d gone straight from college to a T14 law school, and then to a top-ten, “white shoe” firm in NYC. He’d just finished three full years as an associate there.

Dear Rising 2L,

👉 You know LinkedIn is the first place any prospective employer will look you up. (And they will look you up.)

You’ve got early OCI* coming up (*on-campus interviews).

Don’t make it hard for law firms to find you.

Dear Legal Writer,

As a junior legal writer, you likely tend to use “Therefore” and “Thus” too often. And you probably always put them at the start of sentences, followed by a comma.

That can make for some pretty plodding prose.  👎

This post is for all in my network. It explains how to shorten and change the wording of your name in your LinkedIn address.

You should follow the below steps and then add your personalized LinkedIn address to the top of your resume, with your email address and phone number.

Dear Rising 2L:  Please see this video I made just for you.

Dear Rising 2L,

I have a tendency to do something bad that caused me to bomb a job interview. It’s a weakness of mine, and I didn’t keep it in check. If you have this same tendency, don’t let it ruin your interviews.

***

Dear Legal Writer, Lindsey Lawton and I partner today to bring you this tip on a common sentence-starter that’s tripped folks up lately:

“As __, . . .”

For example,

“As a lawyer, . . .”
“As plaintiff in a tort case, . . .”
“As the judge of record, . . . “

I lost ~400 followers overnight.

Luckily, I know why, and it’s nothing “bad” I’ve done.

In fact, it’s a good thing. Why?

Because LinkedIn is cleaning house.

It is going through all accounts, figuring out which are dormant or fake, and removing them from the network.

Dear Rising 2L, This legal resume tip explains how to make all your date entries line up perfectly, flush with the right margin.

Instead, I know, you’ve been tabbing and spacing over, trying to get it “just right” so your dates look straight.

Well, they don’t.

When I was 24, I was single, broke, and childless.

—All I said to myself was, ‘I can’t wait to finish law school & start making money,’ and ‘I long to get married and have children.’

When I was 34, we had 3 girls under age 5.

—We paid for 1 full-time nanny & 2 full-time daycare programs, at an after-tax cost of ~80K annually.

Hypothetically, let’s assume it’s a non-diverse, male candidate, and that he’s coming straight from a small, rural college, with

- a 164 LSAT,
- a 3.8 GPA, and
- a need for full scholarship help.

Dear Legal Writer,

If you supervise a lot of junior legal writers, you likely face a passive-voice problem.

Please send them to this carousel for the fix. ⤵️

Dear 1L (Rising 2L?),

It seems cruel. Your “reward” for finishing the hardest year of law school is staying around to do an onerous Bluebook test and—yet another—big legal-writing project.

I would be SO tempted to skip the whole thing.