An attorney resume gets read by two very different people, and most examples online are written for neither. A hiring partner wants to know what matters you have actually run. A legal recruiter wants to confirm three facts in under a minute: where you are admitted, what you practice, and whether your class year fits the opening. A resume that buries any of those three gets set aside, no matter how good the work behind it was.

This page shows a complete two-page attorney resume built around the problems that actually trip up experienced lawyers: how to write a promotion run from associate to counsel at one firm, how to format a bar admissions block the way state bars record it, how to describe matters without breaching client confidence, and which practice area lines survive a conflicts check. The example below covers twelve years across four firms, which is exactly the career shape where these decisions start to matter.

The example runs two pages, which is correct for a lawyer with more than eight years of practice. One page forces you to cut matters that prove seniority; three pages signal you cannot prioritize, which is a bad look for someone paid to prioritize. If you are within five years of your Juris Doctor (JD), one page is still the safer default, and the general rule of thumb in one page versus two applies to lawyers the same way it applies to everyone else.

Read the example with two things in mind. First, the education section sits at the bottom, not the top. Law school placement is a class-year signal, and recruiters will find it wherever it is; after your first couple of years, experience leads. Second, notice that the bar admissions block is its own section near the top of page one, not a line hidden under education. That placement is deliberate, and the section on admissions below explains why.

A legal recruiter screens for fit before quality. The first pass checks jurisdiction (are you admitted where the seat is), practice area (does your work match the group that is hiring), and class year (does your JD year fit the band the firm will pay for). If any of those three takes more than a few seconds to find, you have made the recruiter work, and recruiters screening dozens of lateral candidates do not work for you. This is why admissions, practice areas, and your JD year all need to be findable without scrolling logic: admissions near the top, practice areas in or right under your summary, JD year stated plainly in education.

A hiring partner reads differently. Partners skim past the labels and go straight to the matters: what did you actually do on them, and at what level of responsibility. "Second-chaired a two-week jury trial" tells a partner more than a paragraph of practice-area vocabulary. The verbs carry the seniority signal. "Drafted" and "researched" read junior; "argued," "negotiated," "led," and "advised" read senior. If your bullets at year ten still open with "assisted," the partner assumes you were never given the lead, which may be unfair but is the inference that gets made.

Write for both readers at once: labels and credentials structured for the recruiter's sixty-second scan, matter bullets written for the partner who reads page one closely and page two only if page one earned it.

A promotion run at one firm is the strongest signal on a lateral resume, and most lawyers format it in the way that hides it. Written as three separate entries, Associate, Senior Associate, and Counsel each look like a job, and a skimming reader sees three short tenures instead of one nine-year climb. Stacked under a single firm header, the same history reads as what it is: one firm that promoted you twice.

The stacked format puts the firm name and full date range on the header line, then lists each title with its own dates beneath it. Bullets can sit under the whole entry or under each title. Both treatments are legitimate; they answer different questions.

One parsing note: some applicant tracking systems (ATS) read a stacked entry as a single position with the earliest start date, which works in your favor because it records the full tenure. Keep the firm name on its own line and each title with its own date range on the line below, and the entry parses cleanly. If you want to check how a specific layout parses, the structures in the ATS resume format guide hold for legal resumes too.

At twelve years you have more matters than a two-page resume can hold, so the real skill is triage. The bullet count for each role should track how recent and how relevant it is, not how much you remember about it. A sensible budget for the example above: five to six bullets for the counsel years, three to four for the senior associate years, two for the early associate years, and one line each for the first two firms. The math on bullets per job is the same as any field; lawyers just resist it harder.

A matter earns a full bullet, or two, when it meets at least one of these tests:

Everything else compresses into a practice summary line: "Additional matters spanning contract disputes, trade secret litigation, and pre-suit counseling for technology and logistics clients." That one sentence covers a dozen matters honestly and costs you three lines instead of thirty. Anything older than roughly fifteen years can usually go entirely; the standard guidance on how far back a resume should go applies, with the one legal exception that a prestigious clerkship stays no matter how old it is.

Bar admissions get their own section, placed high on page one. Not a line under education, not a footnote under "licenses." Admission is the single hardest requirement in any attorney posting; a recruiter who cannot find your jurisdiction in ten seconds moves on, and an ATS keyword filter set to "New York bar" needs the words on the page.

Format each admission the way the state bar records it: jurisdiction, year admitted, current status. The status word matters more than most lawyers realize. "Active" and "in good standing" are the phrases a background check will verify against the bar's public record, and stating them up front reads as a lawyer who knows what the verification step looks like. If you hold an inactive admission, say "inactive" plainly; omitting the status on one line when the others carry it invites the wrong question.

Two things never to do here. Do not write "barred in New York," which is informal at best and reads as a malapropism to a careful reader; write "admitted." And never fudge a year or a status. Bar records are public, searchable, and checked as a matter of routine in legal hiring. This is the one section of an attorney resume where a small inaccuracy is not a typo, it is a candor problem.

Your practice areas line does two jobs. It routes your resume to the right group, and it feeds the conflicts check every firm runs before an offer. Write it with both in mind.

Use the recognized names of practices, not marketing phrasing. "Complex commercial litigation, securities litigation, internal investigations" routes cleanly; "high-stakes dispute resolution for demanding clients" routes nowhere and matches no keyword filter. If your work sits in a recognized sub-specialty, name it: "ERISA litigation" and "FCPA investigations" are search terms recruiters actually run, and the generic parent category is not a substitute.

The conflicts angle cuts the other way: be specific about practices, general about parties. "Represented plaintiffs in opt-out securities actions against major financial institutions" tells the conflicts team what to check without naming a client. Naming adverse parties or clients on a resume can itself create a problem, because the resume travels through recruiters and inboxes you do not control. Industry plus posture ("defended pharmaceutical manufacturers in product liability MDL proceedings") gives a firm everything it needs to run the check and nothing it should not have.

The hardest writing problem on an attorney resume is that your best evidence is confidential. The solution is not to write vaguely; it is to anonymize the client and keep the outcome. A bullet loses nothing when the client becomes an industry descriptor, and it loses everything when the result becomes "assisted with various litigation matters."

The pattern that works: role, matter type, anonymized client descriptor, outcome. Compare these:

Everything in the strong versions is checkable in an interview and none of it identifies a client. Public matters are the exception: if the case is reported, the verdict was covered, or the deal was announced, you may name it, and you should, because a named public win is the most credible line on the page. For everything else, the test is simple: could opposing counsel read this bullet and identify the client or the matter? If yes, generalize the descriptor, not the outcome.

One more discipline: outcomes must be yours to claim at the level you claim them. "Won summary judgment" from a third-year associate who drafted one section of the brief will come apart in the first ten minutes of a partner interview. "Drafted the successful summary judgment motion" is accurate, still strong, and survives questioning. Strong action verbs only help if the verb matches what you actually did.

An in-house legal department reads your resume through a different lens: not "what matters have you run" but "how much outside counsel spend do you replace, and can you work with the business." If you are targeting a general counsel or in-house counsel role, the same twelve years get reframed, and you should keep the firm version and the in-house version as two separate documents rather than one compromise resume. Roleframe's role workspaces exist for exactly this: one base resume per target, so the litigation-partner version and the in-house version each stay sharp instead of blurring into each other.

What changes on the in-house version:

Each of these has a correct home, and it moves as your career lengthens.

Clerkships are experience, not education. List a judicial clerkship as an entry in your experience section with the judge's name, the court, and the term. In your first five years it can sit at or near the top; by year twelve it sits in chronological position, but it never gets cut. A federal clerkship keeps opening doors decades after the term ended, and every legal reader looks for it.

Publications and speaking get a short section at the end of page two: title, publication or venue, year. Two to four entries, most recent and most relevant first. For a firm audience, a practice-area article in a real publication signals expertise and business development instinct in one line. Cut law school note-length entries once you have practitioner publications to replace them.

Pro bono belongs inside your experience, not in a separate "volunteering" section, because for a lawyer it is practice. A pro bono trial may be the only first-chair trial experience a mid-level litigator has, and it counts. One dated line under the relevant firm entry, written like any other matter bullet: "First-chaired a pro bono asylum hearing; asylum granted." That single line does more for a litigation resume than a paragraph of committee memberships.

Bar association roles earn a line only if they are active and substantive: chairing a committee, yes; paying dues, no.

Legal recruiting runs on searchable terms more than most lawyers assume, both in the ATS filters firms use and in the database searches legal recruiters run. The terms are not exotic; the failure mode is having them implied rather than stated. "Handled discovery disputes" does not match a search for "e-discovery." Placement matters as much as presence, so here is where each category of term should live:

Pull the exact terms from the posting you are answering rather than guessing at a master list; the method in how to pull resume keywords from a job description works on legal postings the same way. Two spelling notes worth the pedantry: use the spelling of "judgment" the way courts do, and match the posting's own phrasing when it distinguishes "counsel" from "of counsel," because titles in legal hiring are load-bearing.

The example on this page gives you the structure. Whether your version works depends on one specific posting: the jurisdiction it requires, the practice group it names, the class-year band it implies. Read the posting line by line and check that every hard requirement appears on your page one in the posting's own words. Then check the softer signals: does your first bullet match the work the group actually does, and does your summary name the practice they are hiring for rather than everything you have ever touched?

You can run that check by hand, or let a tool do the tedious half. Paste the posting into Roleframe and its fit report scores your resume against it: the ATS score, the exact terms the posting screens on that your draft is missing, and a prioritized list of what to change. You make the edits yourself, with Remi, its career copilot, helping bullet by bullet and you approving every change, which matters more in law than anywhere else. A resume claim you cannot defend under questioning is a candor problem, and no lawyer should send a document another author wrote for them. Export as PDF; it preserves your formatting exactly, and it is what firms expect unless a posting explicitly asks otherwise.