Mastering the Art of a Legal Internship CV: A Complete Guide

The Essential Role of a Legal Internship CV

The purpose of your legal internship CV is to serve as a screen-out process for employers. Employers can be inundated with a flood of job applications, and having a well-structured and clearly formatted CV can help. It gives a helpful first impression that you are organized, clear-thinking, and focused. Employers will look at your CV and form a quick mental picture of you as a person. They will consider whether you have the right skills and expertise for the position. If they decide yes, you will get an interview. If they are not convinced, it will end there.
Thus, the CV is a vital tool to market yourself to the employer, and to help you stand out from other applicants. Usually , your legal internship CV will have the biggest impact on the employer’s decision whether to interview you or not. This is because you first need to get through the screening process before you can actually go and meet them in person. It is not enough to have just a general CV; you need to tailor it to the specific position so as to demonstrate your knowledge and interest in the company, the role, and the employment conditions.
Usually, law schools do not have the time or resources to give their students detailed individual feedback on their CVs, and often they do not teach how to write CVs either. Thus, many law students rotate between different firms and graduate without knowing the correct way to set up a legal CV. It needs practice to write a legal CV sufficiently and there are ways to improve.

Key Elements of a Legal Internship CV

Your CV should include your contact information, your objective statement, your education, coursework, legal experience(s), skills, and additional activities.
Contact information In the top right corner or centered, it is important to include your contact information. Here you should include your name, address, email address, and your telephone number.
Objective statement You may include your career objective. Your objective statement should reflect your short-term or long term goals. Your objective should be clear, specific, and meaningful. Make sure that your objective statement is geared towards the employer you are applying with.
Education It is important to emphasize your education. List the name of the law school you are attending, the city it is in, and when you attend. You should also include whether you are a day or evening student. If you have declared your concentration, you should include that as well.
Relevant Coursework If you have taken specific classes that relate to the area of law you hope to practice in, you should include them. For example: Administrative Law, Immigration Law, Family Law, Constitutional Law, Contracts, etc. You should only include these courses if they apply to your goal.
Legal Experience(s) Your employment history is extremely important. If you have interned, clerked, or practiced, be sure to include this information in your CV. You should include the name of the organization, where they are located, and their telephone number. You should include the position you held within the organization, for example, Clerk, Legal Assistant, Research Fellow, etc. Include when you began and ended your employment. Also list any relevant work duty you completed. In this section, it is also best to include some of the research and writing you have done. It is also helpful to include your notable skills in this section as well.
Skills Include any technological and software or computer programs you have become accustomed to working with. If you know more than one language, be sure to list that under this section. Make sure your CV does not exceed two pages.

How to Tailor Your CV for Law or Legal Internships

Cohesive and Target-Specific
With so many types of available legal internships, knowing how to tailor your CV could mean the difference between a callback for an interview and a rejection letter. Often overlooked, crafting your CV to touch on the areas that would be of the most interest to the firm will get you noticed. This is where knowing their practice areas and where you fit is important. If you have experience with a specific area of law that isn’t at the firm, it could be worth eliminating it from the CV.
You should be aware of the differences between the CVs needed for private law firms, government agencies, public-interest groups and the corporate world. For example, CVs for an internship at a government agency, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), generally need less formal education and related work experience than corporate internships. These government agencies are more likely to be impressed by other attributes, such as organizational abilities and interest in public service. For government jobs, demonstrate a willingness to integrate yourself into the legal and administrative aspects of the office. Be aware of the particular mission and culture of the office so that you can present yourself as a person that would be effective in serving that mission.
To gather specific information regarding the unique areas of interest for each type of employer, it is helpful to use resources like Vault.com (if you don’t have access through your law school, you may be able to subscribe for as little as $10/month). This resource provides in-depth articles about employers’ needs, missions, colleague’s reports, and much more.

Creating a Strong Objective Statement

The most important part of your law CV is undoubtedly the objective statement. Writing a great objective statement will take time and practice, but it is vital to achieving the career you’re aiming for. The critical thing to remember when writing your objective statement is that there are two times when you should write an objective statement on your CV: There is a difference between a "Career Objective" and a "Job Objective." A "Career Objective" tells the recruiter about you as an individual, and what you will bring to their organization in terms of ability and talent. A "Job Objective," on the other hand, relates specifically to the advertised internship that you are applying for. While there is no rigid rule stating you cannot apply the same objective statement to both positions, it’s not generally considered good practice. Some employers still expect to see an "Objective" clearly defined in the first paragraph of your law CV. To that end, here are a few tips on how best to word the objective statement in your CV.

• Brief and Concise You need do no more than a couple of short sentences, so try and keep to between two and four sentences. Be concise and avoid repeating what you have already mentioned elsewhere in your CV.
• Only Apply For Positions For Which You Are Qualified It’s so easy these days to fire off 50-100 applications and write generic cover letters; however, if you want your application to stand out, you must take the time to read through the application instructions thoroughly! Only apply for the positions for which you have the skills, experience, and qualifications.
• Tell Them What You Will Do for Them Another classic mistake is writing your objective statement in a way that only draws attention to the candidate (you!) rather than telling the recruiter why you are so precious to them. Take your cue from what is mentioned in the internship’s job specification and then write your objective statement to include what value you will add to the company as a result of being awarded the internship.
• Use Sentence Case Rather than Title Case Many applicants try to make their objective statements stand out by writing them in title case i.e. "I Am A Hardworking, Dedicated and Experienced Intern." However, this method of writing actually makes reading a little difficult. Instead, be original and genuine with your choice of words and use sentence case.
• Use Powerful and Engaging Language In order for your objective statement to be effective, you must use language that is attention grabbing and powerful. By using definite language, rather than ambiguous expressions, you will show the recruiter that you are serious about your application and that you are truly interested in their company and the position for which you are applying.
• Avoid Overused Phrases Once you realize the importance of your objective statement, you may find yourself copying phrases from other law CVs in order to help you write your own. It’s okay to find inspiration from other examples, but don’t make the mistake of copying them verbatim. Always be sure to cut the fluff and only use the buzzwords and phrases that will be relevant to the reader. Below is a list of phrases that are now overused and have become generic;
• Avoid First Person It may seem tempting to write the objective statement in the first person – "I am a passionate law graduate" – but this can lead the recruiter to believe that you are not necessarily aware of the formalities of writing a CV. When it comes to writing CVs and cover letters, you should use the third person and your form of address should always remain "I" and not "My."

How to List Education and Legal Courses

Education is paramount to the majority of legal positions.
Law students should note their law school degree, or law school in progress, as well as undergraduate education on the CV. If you went to law school but did not obtain your degree, that fact should be included on the CV as well. You may also want to note some of the classes you packed into that packed schedule, especially if they are pertinent to the position you’re seeking.
For example, if you’re applying for a role that is primarily public finance or banking in nature, including Finance, Accounting, and/or Corporate Law courses will show the recruiter and/or hiring partner that you have been exposed to the kind of work that is expected of you . Of course, the opposite is also true. Listing advanced art and art history courses, which would be useful in a museum or exhibitions law firm, would be less useful on banking position CV.
Even practice specific coursework is useful to include in the education portion of your CV. For example, an attorney who worked in public finance who holds an LLM, Masters Degree in Banking and Finance, should be listing that degree here as well. The last time the attorney held a banking position, this graduate degree may be almost 15 years old, but it is still relevant. In this case, including the approximate year in which you obtained the degree is also not only acceptable – it’s recommended.

How to List Relevant Legal Experience

From a mooting competition, to volunteering at a community legal centre, to working as a paralegal, there are many ways you may have been exposed to the law. This section of your CV is to show those experiences, but also to ensure that you do it in a concise way that doesn’t detract from the other useful information on your CV. Regardless of how much experience you have, you want to give yourself the best opportunity to be invited to interview. You may have been involved in the committee of a mooting competition, or worked as a paralegal at a private firm, these experiences are valuable, but you need to be factual and concise in the way you articulate them. When I run workshop sessions for university law students, there is always a question about how to skillfully promote some aspect of one’s CV that isn’t a law degree or legal experience. To this, I always say to ensure that you showcase experiences that are genuinely useful to your ability as a lawyer, and to never include anything in your CV that you can’t discuss fairly extensively at interview. Our interviews at Herbert Smith Freehills are all interview based, that is, each of the interviewers has a list of questions they want to ask you and we work through them throughout the interview; that is why being able to talk through everything on your CV is so important. In the same way, I would encourage you to be factual in what you include in this section, and to be concise and clear in how you articulate these experiences.
As with all entries in your CV, this should be laid out in reverse chronological order (most recent first). As a starting point, I’d recommend structuring this section as follows: For each experience, I would go through and think about what you did through that opportunity, who you interacted with and how. Ultimately, you want to show that beyond obtaining a legal education, you additionally have experience practicing the law. Again, I would encourage you to go through what you learned from each of these experiences and include these points in your CV to show the benefit you will bring to the team at Herbert Smith Freehills.

Skills to List on Your Legal Internship CV

Your legal internship CV needs to highlight how you have good research skills, a keen attention to detail, strong communication skills, analytical abilities and logistical planning talents. These are all skills that legal internship employers know can develop further through worthwhile experience in a summer job or part-time position.
Research Skills
Whether it is in the library hunting through volumes of law journals and treatises or online utilizing widely available search engines, the ability to research is a skill that most employers will place a high value. Not only do you need to show that you can find what you are looking for, but you have to be able to distinguish the best source of information from merely a pile of data. And when you do find it, can you explain what you found? Can you share your sources in an understandable way? This is the hallmark of the most effective legal researchers and ultimately what employers desire the most.
Attention to Detail
There are very few employers that will extend an offer to an applicant who has submitted a sloppy CV, so it is an easy bet that they will be equally demanding of resumes from candidates who already are working for them. To work as a Summer Associate, you will be asked to address correspondence, write reports and prepare pleadings, and doing so without a second set of eyes looks much worse on a law firm resume than a mere typo. Your application should be complete and accurate with no errors – no misspellings, no grammatical issues and no inaccuracies – the little things will make a big difference in whether or not the employer calls you back for an interview.
Communication Skills
Every attorney should possess good communication skills on all levels – from superior to subordinate and client to co-counsel. Your CV must reflect your ability to communicate well in an interview, over the telephone, via email, face-to-face and through written reports. How you communicate is very important to an employer since you will be expected to interact with a number of people on a daily basis and will have to speak and write in public forums.
Analytical Skills
If you are not good at seeing things from more than one point of view, you might want to rethink your decision to attend law school. An attorney is a professional who will be called upon at some point to analyze facts and apply those facts to the law in order to achieve the desired result for his client and his employer. How well you can see things from every angle while accurately sifting through applicable statutes determines your value as a potential asset in a law firm, not only as a Summer Associate but as an associate down the line and perhaps as a partner some day.
Logistical Planning
As an intern, you are going to have to learn very quickly how to manage your time and resources so that everything gets done. What does this mean? It means that you have to be able to distinguish between the truly important aspects of your job from those that are not such a priority and find a way to juggle your tasks, even if it means asking for help to make a deadline. You have to know when to concentrate on a single assignment and when it is better to switch gears and handle a new matter so that you can remain effective and confident in your abilities at all times.

How to Present Your Legal Internship CV

For your legal internship CV to stand out, it must be neat and well-organized. There is no perfect formatting, however. Each employer will have his or her preferences. Unless you hear otherwise, or a format is specified, choose a format of your preference. Here are some formatting tips that will give you the kind of document employers prefer:
• Keep the font size between 10 to 12 points so that the text is easy to read.
• Use common serif fonts such as Times New Roman, Georgia, and Garamond.
• Leave white space so that the text does not appear to crowd the page.
• Include a left margin equal to the right margin to create balance.
• Avoid hyphenating text by inserting a hard-space after syllable-breaking to force the next portion of the word to the next line.
• Use 1-inch margins on the top and bottom of the page.
• If you are returning your CV via email to the employer and the employer has no special requirements , save your CV as a PDF so formatting does not change.
• If you are applying online and the employer allows for attachments, use the employer’s preferred file type.
• Use headings that apply to your information, such as Education and Work Experience. Also, identify employers with conventional headings such as, Previous Employer or Volunteer Experience.
• Capitalize the first letter in each important word that follows your headings.
• Opt for a single column on your CV (no paragraphs) so facts are easy to identify by the reader.
• Bold headings to separate sections strongly.