Addressing Pandemic Layoffs on Your Legal Resume

One of the questions we are regularly asked is how to deal with layoffs on a resume, and how to deal with pandemic layoffs in particular. While the panic at law firms and corporate in-house legal departments during the pandemic made sense at the time, the market has stabilized and now many attorneys who lost their jobs in 2020 are starting to re-enter the legal job market.  

 While, every situation should addressed individually, we do have a few overarching suggestions. Here is how we generally think about layoffs on a legal resume:

1.      Be honest.     
This one seems so obvious that I’m reluctant to type it, but your resume has to be truthful in every respect.  Expanding the dates of employment, “forgetting” to update your LinkedIn with your end date and/or doing anything to blur a reader’s understanding that you are no longer with a company is unacceptable.  

No employer is going to be surprised that there were layoffs during a pandemic.  Further, every employer is going to eventually know that you aren’t currently employed.  Being transparent and forthright (to the extent that the dates are correct on your resume) is the least you can do.

2.     Don’t address it in the resume. Save it for the cover letter or interview.

You don’t need a bullet point on your resume to state that you were laid off.  A discussion of why you left the employer is best suited for an interview, but can (and probably should) be addressed in the cover letter.  

3.     Stay positive.

Most legal markets are small.  Don’t take the bait to speak poorly of your former employer.  Acknowledge the layoff, comment on the environment at the time (for example, you can state the obvious fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic in 2020) and move on.  This is not the time to lament or wax poetic about the attorneys the employer retained or otherwise speak poorly of your former employer.  Be matter-of-fact about the layoff and just state that you understand that the employer made some difficult decisions and, unfortunately, things didn’t break your way. 

Trashing former employers tends to get back to those former employers.  As I mentioned, the legal market is small (even if you are in a big market).  Don’t burn your bridges now.  

4.     Know that this has happened before.

The most important piece of advice is to stay calm.  Layoffs have happened before and they will probably happen again.  Your window of opportunity to re-enter the job market for both in-house and law firms will remain open for a period of time.  When you are ready to jump back in, make sure you have a great resume, know how to address they layoff and be ready to interview and present your skillset in the most positive way.

5.     Think about the future.

Finally, think about how to prevent this from happening in the future.  If you are at a law firm, the way to insulate yourself from this in the future is to work to build a book of business.  In a legal department, the way to secure your position is to focus on providing as much value to the company as possible in both legal and non-legal ways.  Thinking about preventing a layoff in the future is really about making yourself incredibly valuable to the employer.  

Once you have established yourself as a linchpin at your new employer, don’t forget to update your resume to reflect those new skills!