yale law resume examples

Application Toolkit: Resume

On this webpage, you will find our advice and guidance for approaching the resume component of the application., instructions.

We require a resume as part of the application. Please limit your resume to 1 – 2 pages in length.

The following links are sample resumes from successful applicants in prior years. You do not have to follow the formatting used in these resumes, but all three are examples of well-organized, easy-to-read drafts.

Application Insights: Resume

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Overrated/Underrated Part 3

Continuing our Overrated/Underrated series, this week, we shift our focus to highlight some of the overrated approaches that we recommend applicants avoid as they craft their applications. 

November 17, 2021

Overrated/Underrated Part 2

This week, we continue our Underrated Approaches to the Application series with some additional advice.

October 21, 2021

Overrated/Underrated Part 1

The J.D. Admissions team recently came together to offer their thoughts on some underrated and overrated approaches that applicants might take towards their HLS application. We hope you’ll find some of these nuggets useful.

September 9, 2021

Real Talk: The Resume

This week’s entry in the Real Talk series covers the resume. 

August 25, 2020

Podcast Advice

Navigating law school admissions with miriam & kristi.

Miriam Ingber (Associate Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Yale Law School) and Kristi Jobson (Assistant Dean for Admissions at Harvard Law School) provide candid, accurate, and straightforward advice about law school admissions — direct from the source. They will be joined by guest stars from other law schools to discuss application timing, letters of recommendation, personal statements, and more.

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Resume Workshop

Our Resume Workshop provides applicants with straightforward advice on how to craft their resumes with a reflective activity and guiding questions to consider.

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A Law School Application Resume That Made the Cut

This sample J.D. application resume from a Harvard Law School alum highlights his public service.

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Experts say that a law school resume ought to convey personality.

When applying to law school , chances are good the competition will be strong students with impressive accomplishments. The challenge of the admissions process is to stand out.

One way to distinguish yourself is to craft an exceptional resume that eloquently tells your story.

"One hundred percent of admissions is differentiation," says Mike Spivey, founding partner of the Spivey Consulting Group, which helps law school applicants navigate the admissions process and provides guidance to law schools and other academic institutions about how to achieve institutional goals.

A solid resume gives admissions officers a strong sense of who you are as a person, says Spivey, who worked in law school admissions for more than a decade and served as an assistant dean at the University of Colorado Law School and the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis .

Anthony Ervin, director of admissions at the North Carolina Central University School of Law , says what he looks for in law school resumes is evidence of communication skills, familiarity with the legal profession and an applicant's commitment to public service. Ideally, Ervin says, a law school resume includes relevant work experience such as an internship in an attorney's office.

Ultimately, Ervin says, the goal of a law school resume is to show you are prepared to hack it in law school and could thrive as a law student.

The biggest mistake you can make in a law school resume, Ervin says, is not putting enough effort and thought into it. Applicants who fail to invest enough time into crafting a resume are missing a significant opportunity, he says. "The resume will allow you to elaborate and show more of what you've been doing, in addition to any other supporting documents."

Components of a Compelling Law School Resume

Experts note that there is no single recipe that dictates what types of activities need to be listed on a law school resume, since J.D. applicants from a variety of backgrounds can be outstanding candidates.

Aspiring attorneys shouldn't feel compelled to precisely imitate the journey that someone else took to law school, since there are a variety of ways to wow J.D. admissions officers.

"There is no 'secret formula' or 'perfect path' to law school," Christine Carr, a consultant with the Accepted admissions consulting firm and former associate director of admissions for the Boston University School of Law , wrote in an email. "I read successful applications from bartenders, flight attendants, scientists, as well as paralegals."

Jeff Thomas, executive director of legal programs at Kaplan, says a common misconception among law school applicants is that they need law-related work experience to get into competitive law schools.

"Students really concern themselves with trying to figure out what type of stuff they've done has some sort of connection to the law, and that is entirely unnecessary," he says. "It does not make an applicant any more competitive in the process."

Law schools are curious about what kind of person the applicant is, so they are searching for evidence of positive "character traits," and those qualities can be demonstrated in a variety of workplaces, Thomas emphasizes. "They're looking for leadership and perseverance and work ethic and responsibility, and so the actual construct of the job itself really doesn't matter all that much."

Victoria Turner Turco – founder and president of Turner Educational Advising, a firm that provides guidance to college and law school applicants – suggests that some kinds of blue-collar jobs could be very impressive to law school admissions officers.

Working through college by working as a barista demonstrates "initiative," so such work experience would be worth noting in a law school application resume, Turco says.

She adds that student athletes who compete on their college sports teams should highlight this. The amount of time a college athlete spends at sports practices is often similar to the amount of time a part-time job would require, which means that juggling this activity alongside a full course load is a significant accomplishment, Turco says.

Regardless of what a J.D. hopeful did before applying to law school, it's wise to document all of the most significant academic, extracurricular and professional accomplishments and mention any meaningful community service or volunteering, according to experts.

"In the admissions process we are looking for experiences and activities that showcase skills an applicant will need in law school such as research, writing and analytical thinking," Alyson Suter Alber, associate dean for enrollment planning and strategic initiatives with the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, wrote in an email. "Applicants should also focus on activities that highlight their leadership and team building experience."

Mistakes to Avoid in a Law School Resume

A lack of meticulous proofreading is a common error among J.D. applicants, according to current and former law school admissions officials, so prospective students should copy edit their resumes to ensure that the spelling and grammar is correct throughout.

A less common but severe pitfall in law school application resumes is when they either exaggerate or make unsubstantiated claims, experts warn, adding that this is a major red flag for admissions officers. Another big mistake is when J.D. hopefuls praise themselves using complimentary adjectives or when they describe themselves as possessing skills without providing evidence of those skills.

Excessive modesty can also be problematic, experts say. "The biggest mistake most candidates make in J.D. application resumes is underselling themselves," Daniel Santos – CEO of Prepory, a college and graduate admissions counseling company – wrote in an email. "Most individuals struggle talking about themselves and even more so writing about themselves, so it's no surprise individuals do a poor job of specifically detailing their tangible accomplishments to each organization they've worked at or been a part of."

Law School Resume Example

Below is a genuine sample of a resume that got someone accepted into a top law school. Cameron Clark – a Harvard Law School graduate, civil rights attorney and founder of the REPRESENTED educational consulting firm – provided U.S. News with a copy of the resume he used in his successful J.D. application.

When examining the following resume, prospective law students don't necessarily need to view it as a template to follow as much as a source of inspiration.

Clark strategically used colorful wording in his resume to elicit interest from admissions officers and spark a conversation with his law school interviewer.

He suggests that J.D. hopefuls tailor the structure of their resume based on how far along they are in their career. Individuals who do not have a significant amount of professional experience should highlight their academic accomplishments, extracurricular activities, volunteering experiences and internships, Clark says. More seasoned J.D. applicants should emphasize the professional skills they have developed that would be useful for a legal career, such as public speaking and policy analysis, he says.

"I recommend that my clients build their applications with a general understanding of the type of law they might want to practice," Clark says. "Once they have an idea, we work together to identify the academic and professional experiences that most closely align with their stated interests."

Here is an annotated copy of Clark's law school application resume, with comments from the author about why he constructed the resume in this particular way and evaluations by neutral third parties about the pluses and minuses of this resume.

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Getting Into Law School

• A Law School Resume That Made the Cut
• 2 Law School Admissions Essays That Succeeded
• How to Write a Law School Resume
• Work Experience and Law School Admission
• What Is a Good LSAT Score?

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• Draft your resume with the reader at mind.
• Understand is a resume is one sales toolbox, not an autobiography.
• Make it perceptibly cleanly real clear. What will at employment see in 30 seconds? 5 per?
• Consider an “resume wardrobe” – different my required various employers.
• Be scrupulously honest. Exaggerations button misrepresentation will damage your reputation and professional relationships.
• Be prepared to talk about ever talk of the resume at an download.
• Keep your resume to one page.
• Use a standard font similar as Times Fresh Roman or Garamond.
• Select an front size about 11 point or 12 tip.
• Create margins cannot tiny than .5 inches on all sides.
• Use bold, underlining, and italics consistently in enhance readability.
• Take deliberate style choices, then stick to them throughout.
• Ensures your resume is error available.

Resume Construction

• Include your name, mailing ip, cell number, and Yale communication address.
• When you do not have a post address in New Haven, that is fine, as mailing approaches are becoming optional.
• Add you permanent mailing address to underline ties to that surface when applying to positions nearby.
• List your gender pronouns if you desired.

Education Portion

• List degrees in reverse chronological order.
• Include sum learn of study: past, present, and future.
• List each educational institution, location, degree, and degree date (expected date if currently enrolled).
• Does no insert high language either LSAT score.
• Think going about method much space you devote to each degree. What notice am yours sending to employers?
• Include at your option to a strategic mindset.
• YLS price fewer Honors.
• Moot court/mock trial awards and paper prizes are Honors.
• List Yale Law Journal as an Honor, due to the competitive admission process. List other journal such Activities or create a separate Journal sub-section under Yield Law School.
• List those that are not supported solely on treasury need and are awarded thanks an cheap process.
• If space permits, provide one high brief description in the selection eligible.
• Examples: Tilman Scholarship; the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans; and the NAACP LDF Earl Warren Civil Rights Scholarship.
• Catalog scholarship or join awards that are associated with sommersonne or post-graduate career at the position in the Experience section.
• To not list need-based scholarships and fellowships, including SPIF funding, summer Mary McCarthy funding, and Kirby Simon travel subsidies.
• List the following positioning as Activities or in the Experience teilabschnitt: Coker Fellow, Research Assistant, Deans’ Speaker, Student Delegate, Peers Advocate, Tsai Leadership Program Fellow, and CDO Course Advisor.
• Use this section until accentuate relative skills and special including research and writing skills, visual advocacy, teamwork, and leadership.
• Small the drop, if necessary, the selecting only one of several activities that are of the same genre.
• Provided applying for people service positions, include as many of own service-related activities as space permits to demonstrate your engagement to service. Improve your resume's success rate due employing these Legal skills and keywords. Find out the top ATS keywords for aforementioned specific job.
• Move particularly relevant, intensive, or skills-enhancing activities at the Experience section. Example: clinics.
• Will clear about the watch away future responsibilities, however, describing the concisely timing of last recent is not strictly necessary.
• Creates adenine Study Abroad sub-section in your undergraduate education listing.
• Produce a Thesis sub-section inside your undergraduate education listing. Contains especially if the theme relates to the law.

Suffer Section

• List experiences in reverse chronological order.
• Include experiences up which yourself have committed, nevertheless not yet beginning; describe using future-tense verb.
• Dates can be overall (e.g., Summer 20XX).
• Omit job titles if unimpressive or do no clarify your accountabilities, nonetheless, be consistent with including/excluding titles throughout.
• List experiences that demonstrate knowledge and skills in scales relevant to legal employers, especially research, handwriting, and analysis.
• Emphasize commercial skills including organizational proficiency, leadership, initiative, creativity, communication skills, common perceive, and intellectual ability. Attorney Biography Examples, Skills, the Subject
• View all paid both outstanding experiences.
• Include work assoziiertes with a students get, including regulatory clinic expert, research for a professor, and full work for a student organization. An attorney resume sample which lands interviews and gets vacancies. Our guide contains all the information, tips and browse you'll need to success.
• Rewrite last descriptions written for separate labors and audiences. Eliminate jargon and terminology unfamiliar to one general audience.
• Summarizes smaller or less relevant location to fill gaps. E.g., “Held various positions as salesclerk, remote, and receptionist while in college.”
• Be prepared to discuss significant gaps at interviews.
• Think strategically regarding the amount of physical leeway devoted for each endure. More dark = greater strong.
• Use action verbs and rich print are show. E.g., “researched additionally posted memoranda on issues of jurisdiction and venue,” rather than “involved inside assisting attorneys in the researching and writing of…”

Optional Sections

• Languages: List is significant and/or skill gauge is high. May be useful to delineate writers vs. spoken efficiency. Be scrupulously truthful regarding proficiency liquid. These skills represent often listed stylish broadcast job postings: e.g., legal research abilities, typing skills, operating knowledge of a certain area.
• Thinks strategically about employer’s impressions. Mitteilungen indicate writing skills, but long lists starting publications may signal interest in academic career.
• Consider selective list conversely summery if publication list is long.
• Use Bluebook citation format.
• Being clear about co-authored pieces.
• Interests: Include a few special interests that may be compelling the serve as icebreaker topics while an interview.
• Other skills: list only relevant skills, eliminating those which are universal (e.g., MS Word) or non-related up legal employers’ needs (e.g., C++ programming).

Do Not Include

• Objective or initiation statements.
• Mitarbeiter information (e.g., marital status, parental status).
• Salary requirements.
• “References deliverable on request.”

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Yale Law School Shapes the Future of Artificial Intelligence

“At Yale Law School we don’t just teach students the law, we teach students how to teach artificial intelligence models the law,” said Scott Shapiro ’90, Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy.

Shapiro’s students are building an AI model for use in media law with the DocProject , a program of the Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) clinic that provides pro bono legal representation for documentary filmmakers. 

Shapiro teaches courses on the philosophy of law, cybersecurity, and AI. With support from The Tsai Leadership Program, he plans to lead an AI lab in which students, programmers, and computer scientists will train “jurisprudentially responsible” AI models for use in legal clinics.

“One of the things people always say with AI is that data is sovereign and it’s hard to get good data. Our students produce incredibly high-quality data that gets thrown away. We’re trying to figure out how to recycle it and use it to train models,” said Shapiro. “What if we could take this data and use it to handle more documentaries — because each student is building on the work previous students have done?”

AI poses risks for lawyers and the legal profession — including “privacy and cybersecurity risks, the generation of inaccurate content, copyright infringement, and other intellectual property issues,” as noted by the office of the president of the American Bar Association.

But it also represents tremendous opportunity.

Long before ChatGPT became a household name, Yale Law faculty were immersed in learning about legal pathways to regulating AI — as well as the technology’s potential to introduce efficiencies in legal education and research and widen access to legal services.

Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and founder and director of the Information Society Project (ISP), has been working on issues surrounding digital technology since the 1990s. He points out that the way people talk about AI now echoes the way they talked about the internet during its infancy. Balkin does not consider AI as an “existential risk … [although] it’s not surprising that it’s being treated that way because of the great uncertainty surrounding it,” he said. When the internet was born, “nobody could clearly see all of its potentials and dangers.” This is true of AI, too, he said. 

But under the leadership of Dean Heather K. Gerken, Yale Law School has created physical and virtual space to explore the possibilities of AI for the legal profession, said Shapiro. 

The Tsai Leadership Program is poised to take a leading role in AI at the Law School — hosting visits from leading AI experts, supporting faculty-led ventures, and enhancing the curriculum.

For Shapiro, it’s very good news.

“ Everyone is focusing on  the bad things. [But] being able to service low-income households and clinics so they could handle more clients — that’s intellectually exciting and challenging. That’s what motivates academics and scholars to solve problems people have always dreamed of solving,” he said.

Everyone is focusing on  the bad things [about AI]. But being able to service low-income households and clinics so they could handle more clients — that’s intellectually exciting and challenging.”   —Professor Scott Shapiro

Current Approaches to AI

As AI technology has continued to evolve, so have Yale Law School’s educational offerings. In a given week, students might attend a workshop on AI or seek library assistance with an AI product.

The discussions on AI are as interdisciplinary as the Law School itself. At the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, a conversation that began with a groundbreaking conference in 2018 has continued to spotlight legal, ethical, and equity issues surrounding AI in healthcare through panel events and faculty research.

Several classes at the Law School dig into problems posed by AI in different legal contexts. “Liability and Regulation at the Frontier of AI Development,” taught by Associate Professor of Law Ketan Ramakrishnan ’21, considers regulatory licensing and tort liability rules for harms caused by AI. In “Artificial Intelligence, the Legal Profession, and Procedure,” a seminar led by Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Public Law William Eskridge ’78, students consider whether AI is on course to automate legal procedure.

In the MFIA clinic, which Balkin founded and co-directs, students work on matters related to technology accountability and competition, participate in impact litigation, shape policy, and contribute to conversations on safe technology and the health of digital markets.

In 2021, MFIA began hosting the Tech Accountability & Competition project at the Law School with faculty supervision from Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law David Dinielli. The project is dedicated to reducing harms caused by excessive use of power in digital marketplaces. 

In Shapiro’s AI classes and clinics, cross-disciplinary partnerships add depth to the subject. In 2016, Shapiro partnered with Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law Oona Hathaway ’97 and Professor Joan Feigenbaum, chair of the Computer Science Department at Yale, on a cross-disciplinary “Cyber Conflict” course. Shapiro later teamed up with Sean O’Brien, Lecturer in Law and the founder of the Privacy Lab initiative at ISP, to teach the first iteration of his Cybersecurity course (which is now available online, hosted by Lawfare ) — in which students learned to hack, so as to understand how to approach cybercrime in their practice .

In 2022, Shapiro and his collaborator, Yale Associate Professor of Computer Science Ruzica Piskac, won an Amazon Research Award for their proposal, “Formalizing FISA: using automated reasoning to formalize legal reasoning.” The award became a Yale College course entitled “Law, Logic and Security,” offered in fall 2022. Shapiro audited Piskac’s course on software verification, and the two “learned each other’s languages,” he said. “We prize interdisciplinarity at the Law School a great deal, but this was truly interdisciplinary in a very deep sense. ”

Lillian Goldman Law Library leadership and research instruction librarians have also taken a proactive approach to AI.

Femi Cadmus, Law Librarian and Professor of Law at the Law School, teaches a course called “Technology in the Practice of Law,” in which students experiment with AI-driven platforms like Lexis+ AI, Kira, and Relativity, as well as virtual reality headsets and other tools.

“You can’t teach every possible technology, but you can teach approaches to critically evaluating and assessing technology, [and] you can give them a framework so that when they’re entering a situation using technology they’re asking the right questions,” said Cadmus. 

In one class, she said, a student asked how lawyers using AI can be sure they are safeguarding the client’s data, privacy, and confidentiality. That was the right question, Cadmus said. “You have to check — is it secure? Where is the data coming from? Is it clean? Has it been reviewed?

“What I want them to understand is that technology is great, but it’s prone to misuse by bad actors,” Cadmus said.

Jason Eiseman, Director of Library Technology and Planning, and Nor Ortiz, Technology and Research Librarian, offer regular workshops on “Practical AI” to Law School faculty, staff, and students. 

Eiseman says that regulatory frameworks can’t match the pace of technological development for AI. “The industry is moving so much faster and so much further that there is no getting your arms around it,” he said. “But just because you’re playing catchup doesn’t mean you can’t also take a leadership role. For me, that’s going to mean taking a 30,000-foot view of where things are headed and trying to build education, services, and outreach around these technologies and tools.”

At one faculty workshop this spring, Eiseman and Ortiz outlined the difference between “artificial narrow intelligence” and “artificial general intelligence,” suggested AI tools for use in empirical research and transcription, and answered faculty questions on prompts.

Concerns around the use of AI in legal research often center around the possibility that AI will “hallucinate,” or generate false information. Ortiz said that while AI programs can make hallucinations very unlikely, the risk “cannot be brought down to zero.” That’s one reason why oversight is always important in a legal context, Ortiz and Eiseman cautioned. 

Since 2016, the Law School has hosted dozens of speaking events, colloquiums, and conferences on AI. This spring, ISP will host the “Propaganda and Emerging Technologies” conference, with speakers presenting on topics such as the role of generative AI in shaping political discourse, AI election harms, and topics in AI and democracy. A conference on “The Normative Philosophy of Computing,” to be held in fall 2024, is in the planning stages.

Shapiro and his AI lab recycle student data, like this prompt text, to train models for use in legal clinics.

Shaping the Future of AI

Robert C. Post ’77 is Sterling Professor of Law and an expert in constitutional law. During a conversation with Dean Gerken on the Inside Yale Law School podcast this spring, Post noted that AI poses critical implications for the First Amendment. 

“The internet is going to be governed by AI — and the issue will be how you politically legitimate the operation of an AI. And that seems to me the fundamental legal question/political question here,” Post said. “How you begin to use AI in those fields of communication, which are now dominating the planet? We need to have the equivalence of governance. And right now, we don’t.”

In New Haven, faculty are thinking deeply about that question, and their research is shaping the future of AI, even as AI tools, increasingly, help them do the work.

Balkin’s notion of “ digital information fiduciaries ,” which he proposed in 2014, is often cited in discussions of AI governance. A fiduciary is a person or entity that has a relationship of trust with a beneficiary, and who manages something valuable on the beneficiary’s behalf. “The law should treat digital companies that collect and use end-user data according to fiduciary principles,” Balkin wrote in The Harvard Law Review  in 2020. This would be one way to protect people rendered vulnerable to the asymmetries of power created by new digital technologies, he said.

AI isn’t going anywhere; thus, proactive thinking about its implications at every level of legal education and law writ large is critical.

“A decade from now, there will be significant integration of AI into the scholarly agendas of our faculty and into the everyday life of the Law School,” Balkin predicted. “Conversely, what we do at YLS will affect AI as well. YLS scholars will likely be on the front lines of developing legal solutions for the regulation of AI and related technologies, as well as adapting older doctrines and legal structures to account for AI. They will pioneer new uses of AI in legal research, using AI to ask new kinds of questions.”

They’ll also create new ways of using AI in legal education, he added.

At ISP, fellows are devoted to many areas of technology. Some are focused on algorithmic decision-making; some are focused on social media and platforms. Over time, Balkin said, the two categories have merged, meaning that almost all ISP fellows are working on AI to a greater or lesser degree, and their scholarship is helping push the field forward.

In the summer of 2025, with support from The Tsai Leadership Program, ISP will welcome a cohort of postgraduate fellows with a special focus on AI.

For Shapiro, taking a hands-on approach to the technology is the best way to comprehend how it will intersect with law. Shapiro hopes that by next year he and Piskac will teach a new class called “Law and Large Language Models,” in which students will compete to build the best models — issue-spotting models, for example, or ones that write briefs and memos. 

“Imagine if you went to law school and everyone said, ‘law is important,’ but didn’t teach you anything about law,” he said. “The situation feels similar for AI. We’re talking about it and not actually doing it. What we offer is the opportunity to actually build AI-based tools for legal reasoning. Our research and the new lab is designed to see how we can leverage this new and extremely exciting technology to help fill gaps in access to legal services and prepare students for the transformation of legal practice.”

As Shapiro goes deeper down the rabbit hole of what AI will mean for law, and vice versa, his research is literally keeping him up at night. Not because he’s worried about AI — but because he’s excited about what the future holds.

“It’s intoxicating,” he said. “My job is to teach, and I want to teach the models the best that I can, and teach the students how to do it. That’s about as good as it gets.”

A decade from now, there will be significant integration of AI into the scholarly agendas of our faculty and into the everyday life of the Law School.”  —Professor Jack Balkin 

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