Best Resumes for Attorneys [Paperback]

Joan Fondell (Author), Mary Jo Russo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1994

Finally, a practical guide targeted to meet the special needs of lawyers… As the legal profession becomes more obsessed with the bottom line, it’s more important than ever that you learn how to showcase your attributes, education, and experience most effectively in a tight marketplace. Written by longtime legal search consultants, Best Resumes for Attorneys provides you with the tools to do just that, whatever your level of experience or legal specialty. This clever, concentrated handbook enables you to construct a clear, concise, and persuasive resume that emphasizes your strengths, assists you in writing compelling cover and thank-you letters, and even recommends to you how you can adroitly handle job interviews. Complete with more than 140 sample resumes and cover letters that point up good and bad presentations in 48 legal practice areas, it shows you how to:

• Use formats and action words to give your resume added power
• Maximize the positive impact of your resume by including certain essentials—and excluding peripheral or unintentionally damaging items
• Adjust your resume based on your level of job experience
• Target cover and thank-you letters to various kinds of legal employers
• Successfully handle the toughest interview situations, including questions regarding past conflicts with employers and even termination
• Ace screening and call-back interviews by understanding the vital differences between the two
• Approach reference checking the right way to put yourself in the best possible light

In today’s highly competitive legal environment, the difference between whether you land a job or lose out to another applicant can be as small as a brief item in your resume, a passing response to an interview question, or the strength of a single reference. Give yourself the best chance of securing a new job by relying on the one practical book on the market today that covers all the details and fully understands your particular needs as a job seeker—Fondell and Russo’s Best Resumes for Attorneys.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

JOAN FONDELL and MARY JO RUSSO are partners in Russo and Fondell, a legal search consulting firm with offices in Beverly Hills, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. During their combined 23 years of consulting experience, they have assisted thousands of lawyers in locating new jobs throughout the country and have reviewed tens of thousands of resumes, giving them unique insight into the kinds of resumes that work.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471309206
• ISBN-13: 978-0471309208
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,183,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Best Resumes for Attorneys, March 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Best Resumes for Attorneys (Paperback)

This should be entiled "Best Resumes for Attorneys at the Top of your Class, (As for the rest of you, we're not concerned)." Hey, everyone knows law is extremely competitive, but shouldn't there be something in this book for someone not in top 20% or above. Every sample resume involves being at the top of your class. Obviously, I didn't graduate in the stratosphere but I am far from being alone, 80+%. Also, I've been able to eke out a decent practice despite this. I've used this book for the past few years and it is helpful because there is a large selection of sample resumes and cover letters to choose from, but I've often chuckled to myself when doing so, because for having such a large selection of examples for so many areas of the law, it just deals with the "elite." It never addresses anyone who might be below this standard. That is why I think that its use is somewhat limited and not realistic.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Truly awful, September 16, 2005

By 

Brian A. Schar (Menlo Park, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Best Resumes for Attorneys (Paperback)

A resume is tricky to write, at best. You have to highlight years' worth of accomplishments at different jobs and possibly even different fields in a page or two. Attorney resumes can be particularly complex, as many of us worked for some time at a first career before coming to the law, and need some way to handle that time of our lives in a legal resume. Further, many attorneys have both in-house and firm experience, and will want to tailor the content of their resumes accordingly. In addition, the type of resume a corporation might want to see may be a lot different from what a law firm expects to see.

Given the complexity of the topic, one would expect a book entitled "Best Resumes for Attorneys" to provide some insight into these issues. Instead, the book fails utterly, providing instead a "Best Resume for Attorneys." All experiences are mashed into a bland one-page format that strips out virtually anything that might distinguish you from anyone else. The authors waste precious page space hectoring the reader about how certain example resumes are bad because of formatting errors, as if this were a secretarial handbook rather than a book for professionals. Every example of a so-called "best resume" is virtually identical to every other example provided.

If you read this, your brain will actually expel knowledge it already has about good writing and job search tactics. Avoid entirely. This isn't even worth checking out from the library, because even touching the cover of this book might taint your ability to write like a human being and put together any kind of resume that might actually get you a job.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Should be entitled "Simple Resumes for Top Attorneys only", February 22, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Best Resumes for Attorneys (Hardcover)

This is probably the worst book I've ever reviewed on the subject. Sure, it's great if you are an attorney from a top 10 school at the top 20% of your class, but still are not bright enough to figure out the most basic of tactics. True, the gatekeepers for the elite jobs are not authorized to think outside of the box, and therefore resumes based on these tips will appeal to them; on the other hand, there is no reason that these attorneys should have to put more than a cursory search together as these employers will be chasing them. As to the rest of us presumably unqualified professionals, the book is of absolutely no relevance. Based on this, I presume that the authors (legal recruiters) are likewise only interested in finding jobs for the papered best and brightest.