The Risk of Modifiers

Legal resumes aren’t long documents, so you have to use adjectives and other modifiers to signal to the reader the depth of your experience.  You can’t list all of your litigation experience on the document (that would be a curriculum vitae).  Instead, you summarize, qualify and categorize your experience so the reader can digest it.

You might say that you have “extensive litigation experience including pretrial and motion experience.”  That’s a great way to summarize your experience, but it also is an easy trap where you can overplay your experience.  Extensive is subjective. You want to use adjectives that lead the reader to the proper conclusion.  If you have done some pretrial work, say your experience is that you attended a few hearings and reviewed some files, clearly you shouldn’t call that extensive experience.  

The line where something goes from exposure to an area, to having experience to having extensive experience is fuzzy.  It’s subjective.  But think about the reader.  Your credibility will be shot if they start probing your experience and realize that your extensive experience is really cursory experience.  You’re sunk.  Don’t fall into that trap.

The corollary is also true.  If you have strong experience in an area and you just say that you have “experience with the full-spectrum litigation process” without elaborating, you are truly selling yourself short.  

Spend the time and pay special attention to the words in your legal resume and how they might be interpreted by the reader.  Go through your resume and analyze each of the entries to make sure you are appropriately characterizing your experience.