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Writing a legal CV

Two pages, reverse chronological, evidence rather than adjectives. The part that is specific to law is the usage, the kind of evidence that counts and the fact that most legal employers are nothing like the firms in the brochures.

Last reviewed 12 October 2026.

A legal CV is not a different species from any other CV. It is a conventional document, read quickly, that has to survive three readers in sequence: a system that parses it, a recruiter who reads the stack and a lawyer who will use it as the agenda for an interview. Most of what goes wrong goes wrong at the second stage, and most of it is fixable in an afternoon.

A legal CV has three jobs

  1. Be parsed

    Many employers put your document through an applicant tracking system before a person sees it. Plain headings, one column, no text boxes, no tables, no graphics, no photograph and a file the system can read. A CV laid out in two columns can come out of a parser as one scrambled paragraph, and you will never be told that is what happened.

  2. Survive the first pass

    The recruiter is looking for headings, dates, institutions, grades and whether anything on the page is legal. If those are not findable without hunting, the document is doing the opposite of its job.

  3. Give the interviewer something to ask about

    An interviewer builds questions out of your CV. Every line is an invitation, so put on the page the things you want to be asked about and be ready for every one of them. A line you cannot talk about for two minutes is a line to cut.

The order that works

  1. Your name, and how to reach you

    Name as the heading. Email, telephone number and a town or city. Not a date of birth, not a marital status, not a nationality unless the application asks, and not a photograph: none of that is conventional in a UK legal application, and some of it invites a problem the employer does not want.

  2. Education, most recent first

    Institution, dates, qualification and the actual result, including the grade you are predicted if you have not finished. If your degree classification is strong, this is the section that earns its place at the top. Modules are worth listing only where they are relevant to the employer and only a few of them.

  3. Legal work experience

    Its own heading, above everything else you have done, however short the entries are. A week in a high-street firm, a vacation scheme, a mini-pupillage, a university law clinic, Citizens Advice, a paralegal contract, a mooting competition: this section is the first thing a legal screener looks for and the most common thing to find missing or buried.

  4. Other work experience

    Bar work, retail, a call centre, a summer in a warehouse. It is evidence of the things firms say they want and it is not a weakness. Write it the same way: what you did, at what scale, with what result.

  5. Positions of responsibility and voluntary work

    Society committees, a sports captaincy, a school council, a mentoring scheme, pro bono. The useful part is not the title but what changed because you held it.

  6. Skills and languages

    Languages with a stated level, and anything genuinely technical. Not Microsoft Word, and not a list of adjectives: a skills section made of claims is a section of assertions a screener discounts.

  7. Interests, kept short

    Three or four lines of specific things, not categories. “Reading, travel, socialising” tells a reader nothing. One concrete interest gives a nervous interviewer somewhere easy to start.

Two pages is a convention, not a rule

Most legal employers in England and Wales expect two pages, some ask for one and a handful specify a form instead of a CV. Where an employer states a length, that instruction beats this page. Where it does not, two full pages is the safe assumption, and a CV that runs to one thin page reads as a draft rather than as concision.

Nobody publishes a count of which employers ask for which, so there is no table of it here. If you want to know, the employer’s own graduate recruitment page says, and that is the only authority on it.

What happens in the first pass

You will have read that a recruiter spends six seconds on a CV. It is usually traced to a private eye-tracking study commissioned by a job board rather than to published research, we have not been able to read the study itself, and no equivalent figure has ever been published for legal recruitment. Treat it as a useful exaggeration rather than a measurement.

What is safe to assume is that the first pass is short, that it reads headings before sentences and that it is looking for a small number of things: where you studied, what you got, whether you have done anything legal, and whether the document was written for this employer or for everybody. Design the page so that those four answers are visible without reading a paragraph.

Evidence, not assertion

This is the single difference between a CV that works and one that does not. An assertion is a quality you claim. Evidence is a thing that happened, at a stated scale, with a stated result. A reader cannot check an assertion and does not try; they discount it and move on.

“Excellent attention to detail” is an assertion. “Proofread a 60-page bundle against the index and found eleven misfiled documents before filing” is evidence, and it makes the same claim without making it. The test is whether a sentence could appear unchanged on somebody else’s CV. If it could, it is not telling anybody about you.

Open each bullet with a verb in the past tense — drafted, researched, negotiated, chaired, reduced, represented — and put the number or the outcome in the same bullet. One claim per bullet, two lines at most.

The usage a legal reader notices

These are not pedantry. They are the signals that tell a lawyer whether you have read anything legal, and a legal reader registers them without deciding to.

judgment, not judgement
A court gives a judgment. The spelling with the middle -e- is the ordinary word for the faculty of judgement. Getting this wrong in a sentence about a case you have read is the most visible error on this list.
practise is the verb, practice is the noun
You are authorised to practise as a solicitor; you work in a practice. “Qualified to practice law” is wrong, and it appears on a great many CVs.
claimant, not plaintiff
In civil proceedings in England and Wales the party bringing the claim has been the claimant since the Civil Procedure Rules replaced the old rules in 1999. Plaintiff is American usage here, and dates the document by a quarter of a century. For the same reason a claim is now issued by a claim form, not by a writ.
KC, not QC
Senior barristers have been King’s Counsel since 2022. There are 2,313 King’s Counsel on the Bar Standards Board’s register. If you are describing a barrister you worked with, use the title they hold now.
LLB (Hons), without full stops
The convention is a capital H in brackets after the degree, and no full stops inside the abbreviation. The same goes for LLM and for BPTC or the Bar course by whatever name your provider used.
Not “Dear Sirs”
On a covering letter, name the recipient if the advertisement does. If it does not, “Dear Sir or Madam” is the neutral form. “Dear Sirs” is still used between firms on correspondence and it reads badly from a candidate.

Two more that no checker catches. Counsel is a barrister; a council is a local authority. And solicitor and barrister are not interchangeable words: using one for the other in a sentence about why you want the job is the kind of mistake that ends the reading.

Twelve mistakes that cost an otherwise good application

  1. No date ranges, or two different formats in one document. Every course and every role needs a range, written the same way throughout, or the reader has to guess whether a gap is a gap.
  2. Paragraphs where bullets belong. Prose in an experience section does not survive a short first pass.
  3. Bullets with a run-up. “During my time at the firm I was involved in helping…” spends a line before the content starts. The verb goes first.
  4. Asserted qualities. Team player, hard-working, excellent communication skills, passionate about commercial law. Every one of these is on most of the other CVs in the pile.
  5. “Responsible for”. It describes the job description you were handed, not what you did with it. The same goes for “duties included” and “assisted with” where nothing follows.
  6. No number, scale or outcome anywhere. A page of duties with no quantity on it leaves a reader with your word and nothing else.
  7. Legal experience buried, or missing when it exists at all. A day shadowing a district judge belongs on page one. People leave off the law clinic because it was unpaid.
  8. A skills section of software. Word and Excel are assumed. A genuinely useful technical line is a language with a level or a research database you have actually used.
  9. Lines that tell the reader what they already know. The heading “Curriculum Vitae” and the sentence “References available on request” both spend space on nothing.
  10. Usage errors. Judgement for judgment, practice for practise, plaintiff for claimant, QC for KC, and the firm’s own name misspelt, which happens more often than anyone admits.
  11. One CV for every employer. If nothing on the page could only be true of an application to this employer, you have sent a circular.
  12. A layout the parser cannot read. Columns, tables, text boxes, headers and footers carrying your contact details, a photograph and an icon where a heading should be.

What the CV checker actually checks

The checker on the Data plan reads text you paste in and returns the specific lines that need work. It is a rule engine, not a model, and the rules are these — written out here so you can apply them yourself without paying for anything.

  • Length. Under 180 words it says the document reads as a draft. Over 1,100 words it says it will run past two pages in most formats. In between it tells you the word count and says it fits.
  • Contact details. No email address is a thing to fix. No telephone number is a thing to think about, because interview invitations are often made by phone.
  • Sections. It looks for a short line that reads as a heading for education, experience and skills, and for one covering interests, volunteering or positions of responsibility. A missing heading in the first three is a fix; a missing fourth is a consideration.
  • Dates. At least one year range, written as 2023 to 2026 or 2024 to present, has to appear somewhere.
  • Bullets. It finds the bulleted and numbered lines. If there are none, that is a fix. Then it flags up to four bullets that do not open with a past-tense verb from its list of about sixty and any bullet over 32 words.
  • Evidence. It counts the bullets containing a number, a percentage, a quantity or a money amount. Under a quarter, it says so with the count: four of nineteen bullets, and so on.
  • Phrasing. Twelve phrases, each with a line number and the line quoted back: responsible for, duties included, helped with, various, assisted with, etc., team player, hard-working, excellent communication skills, passionate about, thinking outside the box and working well independently.
  • Legal usage and convention. Judgement, to practice, licence and license, misspellings of barrister, solicitor and defendant, plaintiff, writ, “Dear Sirs”, “I am writing to apply”, the capitalisation of LLB (Hons), L.L.B with full stops, and QC.
  • Four more. Whether “I” appears on more than two lines, which is conventional in a letter and not in a CV. Whether references are offered on request. Whether the heading is “Curriculum Vitae”. And whether anything on the page reads as commercial awareness, or as legal exposure at all — the last of those is the one most worth knowing about.

There is no score. Nobody has measured the relationship between a CV check and an application outcome, so a number here would be an invention, and an invented number is worse than none. You get findings sorted into things to fix, things to consider and things already working.

Your text is read from the request, checked in memory and dropped. It is not written to a database, it is not used to train anything, and reloading the page loses it. The limit is 64 kilobytes of text, which is far more than a CV.

Templates

A template is worth having for one reason: it fixes the layout decisions so you can spend your time on the evidence. Ours are plain, single-column and parseable, in formats that survive an applicant tracking system, with separate versions for training contract, pupillage, apprenticeship and paralegal applications.

What nobody publishes

There is no published figure for how many applications a legal employer receives per vacancy, how long a screener spends on each or what proportion are rejected at the CV stage. Firms hold those numbers and do not release them, and the ones that circulate are anecdote. What is published is the shape of the profession you are applying into: 12,930 companies at Companies House identify as solicitors’ practices and 4,700 offices hold a legal aid contract.

Next: the cover letter, and the why-this-firm question.

Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.