Where do you list your academics and what should the entries contain? Is the answer different as you gain more experience?

1) Where on your resume do you list your academic experience?

In most other lines of work, once you have your first job or two under your belt, your education retreats to the end of your resume.   That is not the case in law. 

If you are looking for a position at the associate level in law firms, the law school class year provides the context against which your experience is evaluated.  The same experience you list will be evaluated differently if you are one year out versus three years out, for example.  In New York, with its typically longer partnership track, your academics remain at the top of your resume until you’re at least  six years out. 

If you are looking for a junior level inhouse job with a legal department of at least a couple of people, the likelihood is that it will be in a subject matter specialist role.  The head in-house lawyer who reads your resume likely comes out of a law firm tradition.  If there is no attorney currently  on staff, typically, a company will ask their outside lawyers to screen and vet resumes. Accordingly, the initial legal review will be accustomed to seeing education go on top and evaluate your experience in a way similar to that of a law firm.

If you are moving laterally as a partner, your education goes after your job entries.

The prospective employer has the right to ask for your date of law school graduation.  It has direct bearing on your level of experience.  If you don’t provide it, your resume may very well get bounced from consideration. 

You may omit graduation years from pre-law school educational institutions.   The assumption drawn from omission is that there is a substantial gap (more than four years, let’s say), between law  and a predecessor school—where law is a second career, for example.   If there is no gap and you omit the year, you are make yourself appear older than you actually are.


An exception to this is if your flavor of practice is IP. If you have technical pre-law school degrees, I think you have to put the graduation years because it has direct relevance to your practice experience. Likewise, pre-law technical employment is an asset for any IP resume and should not be dropped, even as you become more experienced.

2)  What should the entries contain?

The more experienced you are, the more material (experience, affiliations, etc) you have to work with. However, fact is that, statistically, preliminary hiring decisions are made based upon what is on the first page.  Accordingly, as you get more senior, you need to edit what is on that first page--to take advantage of this precious real estate.  At a later blog post I will discuss my views on content of your work experience entries as you get more senior and how to accommodate appropriate detail most effectively.  Here I speak only of academic entries.

 

The rule of thumb is the closer that you are to graduation from law school and college, the more detail is appropriate.  Someone applying for their first job after law school would likely put down college and law school extra-curricular activities and affiliations. 

Once you have had a couple of years of legal experience, it is time to edit down your education detail. To be edited out are non leadership roles in student groups and clinical experience unrelated to subsequent full-time experience and undergraduate jobs unless they are truly exceptional or were gotten based upon academic merit.  In the case of these jobs, as you become more experienced, the descriptions should become shorter. By three or four years out, you should just list them by name and date as part of the undergraduate entry.  Fraternities and sororities are exceptions—you never know when you might come upon an alumnus in a position you who might be more disposed to hire or at least interview a fellow member of such fraterntity/sorority/society.   But once you have had a couple of years of post law school practice experience, no one cares that you were a freshman dorm counselor.

By the time you are eight years out, only the big ticket education items matter on a resume—editor of a law school publication, cum laude , Order of the Coif, etc—really, all that you would put in the website entry of a partner level attorney.