Legal Assistant Resume Example

With a mean salary above the U.S. average and a variety of routes into the profession, becoming a legal assistant or paralegal is an attractive option for a diverse range of people from various educational and career backgrounds.

Follow our tips below to optimize your resume and improve your chances of landing your dream role as a legal assistant or legal secretary.

Tip 1. Use Actions Verbs to Reflect Your Dynamism

Our first tip is to replace dull verbs with energetic and dynamic action verbs.

Check out how our fictional candidate worked action verbs into his resume:

By using “spearheaded” here instead of a less powerful verb such as “introduced” or “launched,” our candidate is more likely to impress a law firm partner and be shortlisted for an interview.

In general, the more action verbs you use, the more dynamic and compelling your application will seem to hiring managers—after all, your writing reflects your personality!

Tip 2. Create a Detailed, Persuasive Work Experience Section

Your work experience section takes up the most space on your resume, so it’s vital that you hone it.

We recommend that job applicants back up claims about their performance with data—a few statistics can go a long way. Check out this example:

As a legal professional, you undoubtedly know that the more evidence an attorney provides increases the chances of winning over a jury.

It’s the same deal with hiring managers—the more evidence of your effectiveness you cram into your resume, the more likely you are to impress them.

Here are some examples of the types of data you can include in your resume:

• Number of cases you juggle each week (or month, or year)
• Law firm budget you manage
• Number of legal documents you draft each week
• Amount of time you’ve saved for attorneys (through better time management, more accurately researched reports etc.)
• Percentage of cases you’ve contributed to that have succeeded compared with your colleagues
• Amount of money you’ve saved your law firm (through efficiencies savings, better time management etc.)

In addition to statistics, you should also give hiring managers an insight into the wide range of tasks you can do: paralegals must juggle numerous responsibilities, so partners will want to know that you can keep a lot of balls in the air.

Our candidate listed five distinct types of work he’s tasked with at his current job to showcase his diverse skill set:

From top to bottom, he demonstrated his dependability, oral communication, research and written communication, organizational capacities, and empathetic personality in turn.

Tip 3. Create a Killer Introduction

Because it’s the first thing readers will see, your resume introduction needs to capture potential employers’ attention and make them keep reading.

Our legal assistant candidate introduced himself by using a professional profile, one of the four types of resume introduction (along with the metrics-packed resume summary, achievements-oriented summary of qualifications, and popular resume objective).

The professional profile is ideal for candidates who already have experience in the industry (such as our candidate, who has 6 years’ experience under his belt).

Professional profiles typically contain four bullet points. Let’s look at what those four points include in the case of our legal assistant:

Point #1. Experience and Education

The first bullet point summarizes your experience and education. Because our candidate has substantial experience, he mentioned first that he has 6 years of experience.

Because paralegals and legal assistants don’t necessarily require a particular degree or certification, our candidate made his resume stand out by stating he holds the Professional Paralegal certification.

Point #2. Specialty

The second bullet point is where you state your speciality. For example, our legal assistant has worked for law firms specializing in Family Law.

So, whether your expertise is in Criminal Law, Administrative Law, or Contract Law, be sure to note it here.

Point #3. Showcase Your Skills

In the third bullet point, you should provide any skills that you know are desired by your targeted law firm.

Our candidate knows that as law firms become increasingly digitized, partners want employees who can get to grips with law-firm-relevant software, such as LexisNexis, TrialWorks, and Clio—thus, he chose this skill to highlight here.

Point #4. Highlight an Achievement

Use your last bullet point to highlight an achievement you’re particularly proud of—remember to make it relevant to the position you’re applying for.

Our candidate is particularly proud that he managed to reduce office expenses by 13%, so he listed this.

Think carefully about what to list as your achievement—as already stated, legal assistants perform many diverse tasks, so you’ll have to consider whether you want to choose an office management–, writing–, or client service–based achievement here.

If you’re unsure, refer to the job posting—it will hint at what a law office is looking for, and you can pick an achievement on the basis of that.

Final Words

Creating an effective resume is a vital part of getting that legal assistant or paralegal post that you’ve got your eye on, and following our tips is a surefire way of getting noticed by hiring managers.

Let us know if you have any comments or questions below, and if you’re pushed for time, use our huge collection of resume templates to optimize your job application.

Alternatively, try our AI-powered resume builder and knock out a great resume in mere minutes!