The Responsibilities of a Legal Intern
As a legal intern, you can expect to take on any of a number of responsibilities designed to assist the legal team you work with, including researching and preparing legal documents, meeting with clients and witnesses, compiling data and maintaining case files. Interns are also often responsible for filing legal documents and doing basic administrative work as needed . On a day-to-day basis, responsible for billing timesheets or keeping track of your billable hours and preparing for court hearings are just a couple of the tasks you might take on.
The law firms that typically hire interns expect a high level of professionalism, a strong work ethic and a proactive attitude. Law students are usually expected to be self-starters, good communicators and team players, along with being detail-oriented, analytical and organized. Strong legal research and writing skills are particularly important.
Essential Parts of a Legal Intern Resume
When it comes to crafting a standout legal intern resume, there are some non-negotiable elements that need to be included. These are the sections that define your qualifications and help a hiring manager decide whether you’re qualified for the position. Following, we’ll go over each element and share tips for tailoring them to get the attention of a hiring manager. Objective Statement: At the top of your resume, include a brief statement summarizing your skills, experience, and academic credentials as they apply to the internship you’re applying for. Your objective statement should give the hiring manager a condensed version of your qualifications to help them understand right away why you’re a good fit. Education: It will come as no surprise to learn that a resume for a legal internship needs to focus heavily on education. Include your degree(s) with the name of the school you graduated from and the dates you attended in reverse chronological order—the time frame is for the hiring manager’s reference so don’t worry about including the months. Experience: This is the most important section of your resume because it’s the place where you explain why you’re qualified for the internship. Thanks to your objective statement, an employer will already know who you are and why you’re interested in the specific role for which you’re applying. Now you need to explain how your previous work experience and education have prepared you for this role. Skills: This is your opportunity to list away any specialized skills you have that are applicable to the position in question. For law firm internships, you may want to lead with any legal software programs you’re experienced with. In addition, any specializations worth adding in should go here, along with skills such as time management, multilingual capacity, research and writing, and interviewing experience.
Focusing on Legal Education and Coursework
Your legal education is perhaps your most valuable asset as an intern candidate. While you are not expected to have any prior work experience in the field, schools are selective about admissions, and a solid academic history will likely work in your favor. List your degree(s) first and in reverse chronological order, as you would for your employment history, and include the month and year of completion.
You can also enhance the value of your education, by quirk of intention, through academic projects. These include papers, clinics, moot court participation, and directed research projects. You might also have received any awards or honors for these projects; for instance, if you ever made the honor roll while in law school, you should include this on your resume.
Emphasizing Relevant Experience and Skills
Demonstrating relevant experience is an essential component of any well-constructed legal internship resume. You should highlight the skills and knowledge applicable to the law you’ve gained through jobs you’ve held, as well as your academic endeavors and volunteer service. You should also give legal skills, such as research, writing, language proficiency and computer proficiency, their own dedicated section and keep them separate from the rest of the information, resume experts say. Keep your bulleted lists concise, providing enough details to explain the work you did but without unnecessary verbiage or superlatives. Assume that each employer viewing your resume has read hundreds if not thousands of resumes before evaluating yours, so make sure yours stands out for its directness and compactness rather than for its wordiness. One way to indicate interest in a particular area of law or business field is by listing relevant courses, whether in high school, your undergraduate studies or in law school. If you are applying for a real estate position, for example, it’s reasonable to put any classes or seminars on property law, real estate investment or realty law under "Relevant Coursework." Be specific in citing the subject matter of each course so that the reader doesn’t have to guess what your areas of focus were. Once you have drafted your resume, have someone else read it over and give you feedback so that you can be sure you’re making the right first impression.
Strategies for Crafting an Effective Objective Statement
Every effective resume starts with a strong objective statement that gives the hiring manager a glimpse into not only your career goals, but also your interests in a particular area of law. It should be brief, no more than a couple of lines, but it should also be specific. These types of examples of effective objective statements can help get you started.
"JD Candidate seeking position as Prosecutor in New York District Attorney’s office looking for opportunity to demonstrate strong trial advocacy skills . "
"My goal is to obtain a position as an Associate in Intellectual Property with Smith & Associates in order to use my background as a Computer Science minor in successful patent prosecutions."
"Seeking entry-level position in Trusts & Estates department of the New York firm of Smith & Associates in order to assist in the planning and administration of estates and trusts for the firm’s high net worth clientele."
"I am interested in new opportunities with a firm specializing in corporate immigration law; enabling me to utilize my academic success as Editor on the Immigration Law Review as well as my experience in three semesters of immigration law externships."
Incorporating Action Words into Your Resume
Whether you’re writing about your schoolwork or your professional experiences, describing your duties and accomplishments in convenient terms makes your resume more readable and dynamic. Action words help turn a laundry list of mundane tasks into a compelling description of your work that jumps out at a reviewing attorney.
Many law students and graduates use their resumes to describe their experiences in a straightforward fashion, without creating the dynamic image of what they really did. Here’s an example of what I think is a lackluster resume entry that sits in the "circular file" of many recruiters:
Legal Intern
XYZ Legal Clinic, Kent, OH, August 2006-May 2006
Worked with a team of law students and faculty attorneys serving clients of modest means who could not afford private legal services. Participated in client interviews and evaluated case files. Researched and drafted pleadings. Participated in trial preparation.
The above example is OK, and the details described are certainly better than nothing. Doing undergraduate work in fast food and retail sales was probably also better than doing nothing, but those are generally not entries law students include on their resumes.
Here’s a better version of what the applicant did:
Legal Intern
XYZ Legal Clinic, Kent, OH, August 2006-May 2006
Member of a team of law students and faculty attorneys providing legal assistance to clients of modest means with cases involving wardship, landlord-tenant, unemployment compensation and consumer credit matters. Interviewed clients and evaluated case files. Researched statutory and case law and drafted pleadings. Conducted research among large samples of case files to assess base data for development of software programs designed to streamline the administrative work of the telephone-based interception of warrant information for municipal law enforcement agencies.
The information is the same, but the resume brims with life. It doesn’t sound like a student who was walking around the clinic every day filling in time as an intern, but rather a person who was actively contributing. This is not an uncommon resume tactic. You can find many examples of the use of action words on Wikipedia’s List of Latin etymologies. Here’s a sampling of some action words to consider using in your resume:
That list is obviously not comprehensive, but it should provide you with a good start.
Customizing Your Resume for Various Legal Internships
As you navigate the competitive landscape of summer legal internships, one thing becomes crystal clear — there is no single universal resume that will fit every opportunity you apply for. Each legal intern position is as unique as the firm itself. This is why customizing your resume for each firm is not just a good idea – it’s essential.
Some legal experts argue that having a universal resume is more efficient, but the reality is, law firms are not going to compare cookie-cutter documents. The main takeaway here is that your resume should be a well-tailored suit. Not only does this show the firm that you are interested in them (note: we didn’t say want them), it also emphasizes why you are the ideal candidate for the position.
So why invest time and energy on customizing your resume for an internship or position that you might not receive? Because you have already invested so much to get to this point. So, don’t cut corners on the finish work!
One thing we want to emphasize here is that you are not attempting to create a different persona for each firm. You must still be you. What you want to highlight here is how you as you are the ideal fit for the opportunity at hand. The questions you should be asking yourself (and answering on your resume) include:
The above questions should serve as a quick-reference system as you begin to revise your resume. First, take a look at the advertisement or request for applications for the firm/applied-to position. From here, highlight what experience you have that corresponds to the job duties or responsibilities needed by the firm. Edit previous experiences or add in new ones (if they exist) to help meet these needs.
In addition, by looking at the nature of the firm, you can expand on your own experiences to make them appear applicable to the position. For example, if you were involved in a college-level sports activity and the position you are applying for needs some form of public speaking experience, perhaps you could expand on your abilities in that area and highlight the skills you obtained through being in front of an audience time and again.
We understand that this is an arduous task, and it is sometimes difficult to know exactly what to edit, add or highlight. With this guide, however, we hope that you have a better idea where to start!
Proofreading and Formatting for Legal Intern Resume Excellence
Proofreading and formatting are essential in ensuring a professional and successful resume, especially for an legal intern. McDonald & Partners takes this further by ensuring that its staff take the time to read all parts of all incoming resumes. The proofreading process is also a chance to make sure your resume is formatted correctly for the firm you are applying to.
Accurately correcting grammar, punctuation and spelling errors in your legal resume is absolutely essential in order to ensure that you capture a potential employers attention. Even minor mistakes can jeopardize your shot at landing the legal internship you are applying for. What needs to be most avoided: the "spell check mistake" – think your hand will sort out the details of an application? Think again – even the best spell check will not catch the most common mistakes we see on resumes:
• Replacing a word with an alternate spelling (for example, signing a check with "David" instead of "Davide" – both of which are valid English spellings);
• Correctly replacing perspective with prospective (or vice versa) and other common words that may not have an obvious spelling error;
• Spell checking an abbreviated word (like UNBC) leading to unintended consequences in meaning (does this mean the university named British Columbia or does it mean a known place from the book; NAESB?)
Both of these leave the reader to guess what the writer wanted to say. Avoiding the "spell check mistake" can be done by having a collaboration of people proofread your work. This includes your parents, sibling, grandparents or professors (preferably those who know you well). You can also pay a company to do the proofreading for you – but sometimes it’s more worth the expense than going to a regular grocery store! When working with a law firm, your lawyer might ask a co-op student or junior associate (or student doing a short articling term) to do the proofreading and editing for you.
Format is important in a legal resume because we need to know where to look. A good way to approach this is to list your credentials in reverse chronological order, with the most recent achievements listed first. Use bullet points and create what is referred to as a "dummy document" – try doing this on a piece of blank paper if you don’t have access to a computer . List all your information like this:
Associate of Arts Transfer Program, University of Northern British Columbia
Prince George, BC
Month Away 2011 to Month Away 2012
• Take courses in all arts disciplines while completing an English co-op work placement
• Completed courses: International Politics, Physics, Astronomy and Anthropology for fall semester and Sociology, Criminology, Psychology, and Literature and Creative Writing for winter semester
• Applied in fall 2012 to the Criminal Justice and Forensic Science and Technology programs at UNBC and KPU
• Graduated with distinction
Associate of Arts General Studies, University of Northern British Columbia
Prince George, BC
Month Away 2011 to Month 2011
• Completed first year of studies by combining distance and in-person studies
• Completed 9 courses in first year: geography, history, sociology, criminology, psychology, English, and visual arts
• Obtained a GPA of 3.6
General Studies, College of New Caledonia
Prince George, BC
Month 2011 to Month 2011
• Completed high school upgrading courses for summer semester while working full time
• Completed upgrading courses in biology, chemistry, and math (Alexander College); took required provincial dates on other subjects
Associate of Arts General Studies, College of New Caledonia
Prince George, BC
Month Year to Month Year
• Completed first semester of studies by distance education
• Completed 3 courses in math, sociology, and English
Classic inquiry of a legal resume: What references fought over you by email or phone at high school or elementary school?
You will want to list these at the very bottom of the resume. Some of the best potential references are former teachers you have worked with, especially if the teaching assistant was a graduate student at a well-known law school or university.
It is important to remember that the appearance of the resume you send could appear a complete different shape when it reaches your potential employer, so make sure that you use a clean format. However, law offices have their own particular rules about "clean" resumes and editing – but most are similar: