5 Tips for Job Hunting Over Winter Break

Whether you are seeking your summer internship or looking for post-graduate employment, the winter break is a good time to organize your job search campaign. 

1. Update your resume and LinkedIn profile. Be sure to add any clinic experience or leadership activities you participated in this past semester. For help on updating your resume and LinkedIn profile, you can download the Resume Tips handout and the LinkedIn for Law Students Guide by visiting Symplicity > Job Search Handouts > Document Library section and doing a keyword search using the name of the document. The Career Services Office will be available to review resumes and cover letters starting January 6. 

2. Set up an informational interview. Use this time to research alums or other attorneys in your practice area and city of choice and set up an informational interview. Use the Contact Alumni tab in Symplicity or the LinkedIn Alumni search to find attorneys to contact in order to set up an interview either in person or on the phone. Also download the CSO Informational Interview Guide which is a helpful resource that will walk you through the process.

3. Reconnect with old contacts and establish new ones. The holidays are a perfect time to connect with former employers and colleagues in order to wish them well and update them on your academic and career progress. This article provides great networking tips for the holidays.  Use holiday parties to update old friends, relatives, and neighbors with your interests and where you would like to practice. You never know who has valuable contacts that could lead to opportunities.

4. Apply to jobs and research potential employers to contact directly. Use Symplicity to search for jobs by going to the “Job Postings” tab and selecting “CSO JobNet”.  Search through other websites listed on our Job Search Resources handout and utilize our handout Targeting Small to Medium-Sized Law Firms using Martindale to do a targeted search for firms and organizations in your geographic area and field of interest. 

5. Relax. Focus on a little rest and relaxation so that you will feel rejuvenated upon your return next semester: sleep in, catch up on your favorite TV shows, do some non-law school related reading, and spend quality time with your family and friends.

Have a happy and productive winter break, from your friends in the Career Services Office!

How to Transform Your Non-Legal Work Experience into In-Demand Skills

By Mo Chanmugham, Esq.

The majority of law students come to law school without any prior legal experience. While many have worked, their experiences range from positions in retail and restaurants to the military or general administrative work. This leaves their resume looking rather light on the type of experience legal employers are looking for when they want to make a summer hire. If only your desire to be a lawyer since you were a kid could be a worthy bullet point in times like this. Don’t fret, there is still a way for you to impress employers with that summer job as a camp counselor.

7 Professional Skills Employers Are Looking For

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey, asking hiring managers what skills they are looking for in the class of 2015, there are a handful of professional skills that are in demand across all majors and degrees.

1. Ability to work in a team structure

2. Ability to make decisions

3. Ability to solve problems

4. Ability to communicate with people inside and outside an organization

5. Ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work

6. Ability to obtain and process information

7. Ability to influence others

So while you must gain core legal skills, such as, conducting legal research, drafting memoranda, reviewing contracts, preparing trial materials, and so on, you can now highlight your non-legal work experience by framing it in the context of these seven professional skills.

Frame Your Work Experience Using These Professional Skills

Use the following format to write your work experience on your resume:

Action verb + responsibility or duty + explanation of how, why, or result

You never want to just say what you did and leave it at that because that is not enough information to make your resume stand out. You want to tell people what you did and why. You could start by looking at the official job description from your last job to help you get started. Job descriptions are written in a way that makes it easy to translate the responsibilities and duties on to your resume in a style and language that employers are used to reading. From there you will have to add your own details about how you completed your responsibilities or why you did them or what result was achieved.

Example: If you worked as an administrative assistant for a real estate company and you helped manage their apartment listings, rather than say:

•   Helped manage apartment listings

You could say:

• Managed apartment listings by collecting and organizing new listings from agents and posting them to company website to increase website traffic.

Example: If you were the lead counselor at a summer camp, rather than say:

• Responsible for 30 campers and organized daily activities.

You could break it up into several lines providing a more detailed and impressive picture of your experience:

• Managed a team of 6 counselors who oversaw the well-being and safety of 30 daily campers.

• Organized educational and athletic activities on camp grounds as well as day trips to museums and farms.

• Communicated effectively with parents regarding sensitive issues such as disruptive behavior.

The possibilities are endless based on how you frame your work experience. You can now effectively communicate your valuable work experience to employers by highlighting the right skills in the right way.

What are memorandums? Frequent Resume Mistakes and Questions

During the Fall Recruitment Season our office receives many resume questions and requests for critiques. From our experience, below are the most frequent resume errors and questions.

Juris Doctor or Juris Doctorate?
When you receive your diploma from New England Law it will say that you received a "Juris Doctor degree." Thus, we advise all students to list their degree as "Juris Doctor" instead of "Juris Doctorate."

Memorandum and Memoranda
If you drafted one memo, refer to it as a memorandum. If you drafted more than one memo, refer to them as memoranda. The use of memo and memos is considerably less formal and there is no such word as "memorandums".

Words Not Caught Bye Spellcheck
We all know that spellcheck is not perfect. It may want to turn your Juris Doctor into a Jurist Doctor and it does not catch misuse of homonyms (i.e. bye instead of by) . It will also miss those misspellings that also happen to be words. Below are a couple of frequent errors we find on student resumes:

Trail instead of Trial
Complied instead of Compiled
...and Public without the "l" is a completely different word and probably not one you'd like to have on your resume!

Spellcheck can be great, but please remember to have one or two others look over your resume for those errors that spellcheck may not find.

Listing your Clinic and Study Abroad Program
Your clinic should be listed under your legal experience section. Ask the clinical office for information about how to list your job description and job title.

You may list your study abroad two ways: either as a subsection under your school section or as a separate school. Here are two examples:

New England School of Law, Boston, MA
Candidate for Juris Doctor, May 2010
Study Abroad: National University of Ireland, Program in International and Comparative Human Rights Law, Galway, Ireland, Summer 2008
or
National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Study Abroad Program in International and Human Rights Comparative Law, Summer 2008

Listing Publications
Publications should be listed as a subsection under your school like so:

Publications: Subsidize Housing and HUD Projects: Economic Confinement on Low-Income Families, New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement, Volume 31, Winter 2004-2005

Note: If you do not yet know the publication date, write Publication Pending where you would normally list the volume and issue.

One page or two?
Your resume should be one page. The only exception to this rule is if you have five years or more of professional work experience between college and starting law school.

But I have a lot of experience and it won't fit onto one page!

Try the following:

1. Make your margins smaller. Adjust your margins to at least .5" on each side.
2. Make your font size smaller. The smallest your font size can be is 10 points.
   
3. List your address on one line running across the page.

It is still going onto a second page.
Send it to us! The career counselors in the CSO are well versed in the tricks to the trade as to how to get a resume onto one page. We are always here to help. Please feel free to email your resume to cso@nesl.edu to be reviewed by a counselor.

For more tips on how to write the perfect legal resume, read the resume section of our handbook!