How to Get Called for an Interview at a Law Firm

Troy Doucet, a 2010 Capital University Law School graduate, is the principal of Doucet & Associates Co., L.P.A. Troy hires students and lawyers for various roles within his firm. As an OPDBlog guest blogger, he offers the following advice and guidance:

Associate candidates are usually asked to submit a resume, cover letter, transcript, and writing sample in response to one of my firm’s posted attorney positions.  The resume and cover letter are the most important of the four when it comes to getting an interview.  The transcript allows me to see where your interests lie during the interview.  Finally, the writing sample is something that I usually review after the interview to seal the deal, or indicate the search needs to continue.

These four documents are submitted via email to my firm, and I the first thing I open is the resume or cover letter.  I do not have a particular preference for one or the other, but rather open whichever catches my eye first, and I almost always look at both.  For this reason, pay close attention to these two documents, as they will dictate whether you get a call for an interview. 

Your resume mainly demonstrates your competence, and your cover letter demonstrates your interest.  Your resume is the tool that shows an employer whether you will be able to understand and work with the law, and especially the area of the law practiced by your employer.  Since we litigate civil consumer matters, it will show me whether you have had experience in litigation, consumer protection, and the extent of that experience.  Even if you have not had this kind of experience, your resume is where you concisely convey your qualifications for being hired for the job.

When I review a resume, the first area that I look for is your education.  I am looking for a few things, and grade point average or class ranking in law school is one of them, as well as specific class honors.  While I am not going to disregard a resume that does not state GPA or rank (stating a great 3L GPA next to your cumulative GPA is completely acceptable), I will assume your grades were not as strong as you would have liked.  I may look at your transcript if it is not listed on your resume.  I will then look to other information in your resume or cover letter to determine whether to bring you in for an interview.  While I will talk about a cover letter shortly, you can overcome challenging grades with relevant experience and an excellent cover letter that is specifically tailored to my firm.  You can also mitigate against not listing a GPA if you did well during your undergraduate studies and say so on your resume.  However, the total educational part of your resume remains very important.

Because the educational part of your resume is important, I suggest you place it at the top of your resume.  The only thing above it should be any bar admissions, so I understand immediately whether I can hire you for an associate position (versus law clerk until you are licensed).  Under your school name, you should indicate any graduating honors you received, GPA and rank (if they are strong), and then any awards for the highest grade in a class.  Call the award “Highest Grade” if you are not local, and then state the course name, rather than using a long title that requires me to hunt down the actual class.  For example, I do not recommend calling your award the, “Deans Special Certificate for the Most Outstanding Grade of the Semester in this Course Award.”  Even if that is what you school calls it, just write, “Highest Grade” next to the course name so I can see what course you obtained that highest grade in. 

Follow your educational honors with any research assistant positions you held.  Research assistant positions show an employer that a professor thought highly enough of you to hire you to help with his or her personal projects.  Also include law review work and the names of notes you published, especially if that note had anything to do with my firm’s area of law.  If that is the case, please prominently place it in your resume and add it to your cover letter for good measure.

You can also include leadership roles in student associations in your education section, but those are not going to independently help secure an interview.  They will, however, demonstrate your comfort with public speaking and possibly leadership.  That can be a good skill to have at a litigation-based firm such as mine.

In the same education section, I recommend indicating sample coursework.  I do not see this too often, but I highly value seeing a few select courses listed on your resume that pertain to the kind of law we do.  If you took consumer law and a course on foreclosure defense (very rare), even if you did not obtain the highest grades, put that on your resume because that is what my firm does!  Include three or four courses if all of them are relevant. 

Since I may not look at your transcript pre-interview, conveying course information in your resume tells me you are someone who already has some exposure to our practice area and who probably will enjoy working for my firm.  If you got a good grade in a relevant course, you should certainly also indicate that next to the class, even if it was not the highest grade in the class.  I am looking at your resume for general competence, but also competence in my area of practice.  The more you can convey that kind of specific competence, the more likely I am going to interview you.

After your education section, you should list your practical professional legal experience.  Most people list this in chronological order (most recent first), and I think that is wise.  I am not going to be too concerned with a variety of short-term jobs here, as most students jump around from clerkships to externships during the school year and summers.  However, if you have been out of school for a while but move firms every year, then I will be much less likely to interview you.  (Also keep this in mind once you land a job – try not to move frequently.)  Training attorneys is time intense and expensive, and I am looking for people who will stick around for more than a year, so your stable work history helps show that. 

Externships are one of the best kinds of experiences to put on a resume if you are just graduating law school.  Because our firm is so litigation focused, an externship with a judge will be viewed highly favorably.  All judicial experience is excellent, especially federal bench externship experience because we practice a fair amount before that court.  Other favorable externship experiences are those that are in areas of the law that my firm practices in.  For example, an externship with the Attorney General’s consumer protection division or the Federal Trade Commission would be valuable to see on a resume.  If you are interviewing at a patent firm, obviously patent related externships will be viewed favorable, as would environmental externships at environmental firms.  You get the idea.

Your professional legal experience section should continue with your summer clerk positions and other legal related jobs.  If you work for the summer at a firm, I prefer to see, “Summer, 2014” on your resume versus “May 1, 2014 through August 31, 2014.”  As I said, I do not mind seeing a handful of experiences here if you are just graduating law school.  However, be concise about the experiences you have had.

That said, personally, I do not mind seeing a resume that spans two pages.  If you have a number of experiences and accolades that require substantial space to itemize, feel free to use two pages.  However, please do not use that extra space to describe in paragraphs the totality of your experiences in a position.  There is no way I will read every word on a resume that is written in 9 point font with .05 margins top, sides, and bottom.  The interview is your opportunity to tell me about your jobs in narrative fashion, not your resume.  Use bullet points and short, concise sentences.

Using short, concise sentences conveys information quickly, and enables me to immediately see your value to my firm.  The shorter the sentences, the more I can read and the more I can be convinced that your experiences match with my needs.  In this light, your bullet points should be substantive and directly address a skill, knowledge base, or ability.  The bullet point, “I worked with a variety of computer applications and became knowledgeable about them,” does not convey helpful information to any reader.  Rather, “Proficient in BestCase, Practice Master, and Microsoft Office software applications,” immediately conveys specific and helpful information that can help me decide whether to interview you. 

Any more information than a few concise statements in two to three bullet points will probably not be read, especially by a legal employer sifting through dozens of resumes.  Here is why:  In the case of hiring a new lawyer, I am not looking for a candidate that has developed operational knowledge of some difficult business process, like a COO needing to convey her understanding of a high level management process.  Rather, I am hiring an attorney (or soon to be attorney) that I need to feel comfortable is competent in the law and whose interests pair with my firm’s practice area (to ensure they enjoy the work and stick around).  Overall, I will be less interested in lengthy resume statements, and more focused on short and concise bullet points.  Note, however, attorneys trained in our area of law should describe their work with some technical detail, with possible citations to important cases they have worked on.

Being concise in a resume not only conveys information efficiently, but also demonstrates one of the most valuable skills in a litigator: being able to convey important information quickly, efficiently, and persuasively.  Short and succinct sentences that summarize each position are preferred.  For example, if you worked with the Truth in Lending Act while externing with Judge Sutton at the Sixth Circuit, you definitely want me to know that fact.  Rather than rambling on for a paragraph that nearly ensures I will not read it, put that information in your first bullet point and do not make it hard to find.  If I only read the first few words of the section, “Sixth Circuit” and “TILA” should be very close to each other because that and a pulse will get you an interview. 

After professional experience, you should consider carefully whether to include other professional experience.  If you worked for years before law school, this can be a tremendous benefit while you are interviewing if your professional experience matches the job you are seeking.  For example, someone who spent ten years in human resource management before law school should certainly highlight that job on her resume if she is interviewing for a legal position in a human resources department.  She is nearly certain to get at least an interview, and may even want to put this experience ahead of her professional legal experience if her legal experience is not related to human resources.  In this kind of situation, it will almost always make sense to include the other work experience.

However, placing other professional experience on your resume could be a bad idea if that experience has nothing to do with the job you are seeking.  For example, if you spent fifteen years categorizing beetles in the rain forest, you probably do not want to highlight that on a resume for a mergers and acquisitions position at a white shoe law firm.  However, if you decide to include your prior work history because you believe a particular skillset at that old job will serve the law firm, then use bullet points to highlight that particular skillset (but not the job).  For example, your rain forest job could help you get a mergers and acquisitions interview if it said something like, “Analyzed 15,495 subsets of data annually to ensure compliance with international regulatory schemes,” versus “Compared lots and lots of new bug names against a database to make sure we were not repeating any.” 

After the professional experience section, some candidates will list professional affiliations, community involvement, or interests.  This kind of information shows that you are involved with the community, but it will not independently land you an interview.  Thus, do not go overboard.  I am more interested in your competency than in your organizational affiliations. 

If you need to fill some space on your resume, consider the following.  Few candidates put non-professional work experience from high school or college on their resume, but I think new lawyers should.  Candidates with years of non-related work history can similarly highlight those kinds of personal skills under their prior employers’ names. 

I frequently ask newly graduated lawyers about non-legal experience in an interview, and love to hear experiences where a candidate got their hands dirty.  I delivered newspapers for my first job, then worked in fast food for a few years, and then at a grocery chain before going off to college.  I learned a lot about hard work, organization, and working with and under people with many kinds of personalities.  These kinds of experiences provide prospective on life and people, demonstrate that you are willing to work hard, and hopefully also show that you have a history of staying with a job for a while. 

Demonstrating you are willing to stay at a job is as important to a potential employer as showing that you are competent.  It can be hard to tell whether someone is going to stick with the challenges of a new job, and work history can help uncover whether the candidate is likely to job hop.  Another helpful way of determining whether someone will stay is whether they have an interest in the practice area or firm, which is when I turn to the cover letter.  

After reviewing whether the resume demonstrates competency in the law, I look to see if the cover letter shows an interest in what we do.  The cover letter is your opportunity to sell me whether you have an interest in our area of law, how serious you are about our area of law, our law firm, and whether you are looking to settle down with a law firm like mine.

I wrote about the costs associated with hiring and training new lawyers on my firm’s blog that is called, “How to Interview for a Job at a Law Firm.”  There, I discussed why it is so important to law firms to find associates who will stick around for the long term.  For the purposes of this post and designing your resume packet, you should know that the cover letter is how you convey to an employer that you are interested in the kind of work practiced at that firm, the firm itself, and that you are looking for stable, long-term employment with that firm.  The more energy you put into the cover letter and the more specific it is to the firm you have applied at to interview, the more likely you will be to get an interview.

While drafting a custom cover letter can take up a considerable amount of time, especially when applying for multiple jobs, I almost always interview candidates whose cover letter is clearly written specifically for the position and my law firm.  Read about the law firm online, look at the statutes you will be working with, and maybe even search online filings for cases filed by the principal attorneys.  A well written cover letter is always great, but a custom cover letter demands special attention.

Even if your experience in your resume does not exactly match with your cover letter, a candidate who drafts a page to a page and a half cover letter explaining why their interests align well with my firm is someone I will almost always want to talk to.  A custom cover letter demonstrates a serious time commitment, which usually means you have researched our practice area to become familiar with it, see it as something you could enjoy doing for a living, and that our firm is exactly where you want to work.  This kind of letter also goes miles to calm any concern that I will hire an associate who is just looking for a paycheck until the job they really want comes available.

Again, a custom cover letter is almost always worth drafting.  If your grades or work experience are not exactly where you want them to be, the cover letter is where you can shine.  It is where you can sell an employer on the idea that you are the ideal candidate to hire. 

Once your resume and cover letter successfully convey that you are a candidate that I must interview, the next key document from your packet is your transcript.  While it may not get reviewed closely before our interview (I will still probably glance at your grades), it will likely receive a fair amount of attention during our interview.  I may be different than other employers in the following regard, but you may be surprised to know that I probably will not be focused on that C- you received in first year Criminal Law during our interview (even if I ask about it).  I will also not be so concerned about your overall GPA during our interview.  This is because if you make it to the interview, I already looked at your grades and decided to look past any issues with them. 

Rather than using our interview time for me to question your trouble spots (although I’ll expect some explanation and introspection as to what happened), I will want to focus on your choice of coursework and what classes you enjoyed and what you did not enjoy.  Your grades will help tell the story, but the actual courses are more important for me at the interview stage.  Your coursework shows me where your true interests lie and whether those interests match with my firm’s practice areas.  I will be looking for coursework that is consistent with our practice areas and with litigation, or that you can discuss corollaries between your coursework and our practice.  Matching your actual historical interests with our practice helps me ensure a good long-term fit.  For me, a good grade in a course usually also means an interest in that coursework. 

The last document in your packet that I read is your writing sample because I know your writing can be improved over time.  Some firms may read this document first, and make their primary interviewing decision based on the strength of your writing ability.  There is wisdom in doing that too, but the important concept for you to know is that your writing sample will have a bearing on whether you ultimately get the job. 

I prefer a writing sample that is a motion memorandum or judicial decision because my firm primarily practices in the area of litigation.  Because we are a litigation based firm, I prefer persuasive samples that have an introduction, legal analysis, argument, and conclusion section.  Similarly, I prefer the memorandum be written in C-IRAC format, cite to evidence or case law after nearly every sentence, and be persuasive and professional.  The main idea (e.g., big picture) should be conveyed concisely in the beginning of the document, and the conclusion should be easy to find and easy to read.  This is how I will want you to draft litigation documents, so seeing your ability before hiring is helpful.

Because I am mostly focused on matching your interests to my firm’s practice area, your writing sample will not land you the job on its own.  I understand that there will be some training involved, and that some attorneys need additional time to develop their writing skills.  So, I am not looking for you to be perfect, but you should not write off this document.  A writing sample that is poorly written may cost you the job, especially if I am on the fence about hiring you. 

Here are a few final thoughts on the resume packet.  First, I recommend using Times New Roman as your resume and cover letter font.  They tend to look more professional than rounded fonts like Ariel or Calibri.  Also, a thin horizontal dividing line between sections is appropriate if it works for your template, but please do not place vertical dividing lines on your resume.  It is easier on the employer looking through a stack of resumes to find information exactly where they expect it to be in a format that their eyes are already adjusted to seeing.  This means avoiding fancy templates or getting too creative with the layout.  You want the attention to be on your competency and interest in the job, not your resume’s fancy design.

In the same vein, be aware of how certain websites may submit your resume when you click through them.  For example, Indeed.com’s resume submission function appears to leave out information and poorly formats a resume when a candidate clicks their “quick” submit button.  It is actually rather frustrating to only receive a part of a resume and no supporting documentation if I asked for those materials.  I would rather not have a “quick” submission, but receive the same information from you that all the other candidates will be submitting with their resume packet.  If our advertisement omits our email address for some reason, feel free to call my office and my receptionist can pass that information along.  I recommend avoid mailing an employer your materials on fancy paper unless it is specifically requested (I prefer not to receive mailed packets).  Just follow the directions given.   

Also, I highly recommend giving your potential employer exactly what they asked for in their posted advertisement.  It shows you can follow directions (avoiding an immediate chop for that reason), shows the employer that you are serious about the job, and gives the employer the information they need to successfully evaluate your candidacy.

Further, I do not recommend you wait until the resume submission deadline before sending in your materials.  Other firms may hold the resumes for review at the same time, but I tend to set up interviews with qualified candidates quickly.  It is possible for me to fill a position before the stated deadline, in which case I usually remove the posting.  If you procrastinated until the deadline, you may find the position has already been filled.  

If you submit your materials in response to one of our postings and do not hear from me within about two weeks, your skill set probably does not match what I am looking for at that time.  I do eventually send out turn down letters to all applicants, but sometimes those take a few weeks to generate (we may hold letters to send them after our search is complete).  However, if you want to email me about ten days after you submit your materials to see where my job search is, I am generally happy to respond.  It will also cause me to review your resume again before I  click “reply” (good for you), and if you ask, I am happy to provide some critique as to why I decided not to bring you in for an interview.  I also do not mind when a candidate reapplies to a future job opening if they did not get an interview the first time around.     

Finally, please bring a complete copy of your resume packet with you to our interview, just in case I need a fresh one to work from.  Bringing a list of references is also a nice touch.  With these materials at hand, the job should be just an interview a way!

Troy Doucet is the principal of Doucet & Associates Co., L.P.A., a central Ohio law firm that is focused on helping consumers and those facing foreclosure.  He graduated magna cum laude from Capital University Law School and frequently consults with lawyers looking to work in his area of practice.  He can be reached at www.troydoucet.com.