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How to write a legal assistant resume?

The jury is out, you won’t land your dream job without a modern resume.

A lawyer’s life is very hectic. They need a legal assistant to help accomplish things promptly. So, needless to say, your hiring process will probably go through the lawyer who needs your services.

And as the lawyers put every document and file under extreme scrutiny, your resume will very likely go through the same. Hence, your resume should make the same impact as a good attorney’s closing argument.

As a legal assistant, you must be familiar with the importance of correctly drafting documents, but that likely doesn't include legal assistant resumes.

This blog will help you land your dream job by helping you build the perfect legal administrative assistant resume.

This blog will help both freshers and experienced professionals by guiding you to build both, legal assistant resume with no experience and legal assistant resumes for experienced professionals.

Here is a summary of our Legal Assistant Resume 2022 Guide:

• Do not label your resume header as "CV or Resume". This may get your resume misplaced or confused with someone else’s. Instead, always write your full name on the topmost part of your resume.
• Optimize your resume while applying to different job openings according to the job description.
• Use points to structure the professional experience section and group similar points under unique subheadings to increase its effectiveness.

There is more.

By the end of this legal assistant resume blog, you will learn:

• Why do you need a legal assistant resume?
• How to write the professional experience in the legal assistant resume?
• How to write the certification in the legal assistant resume?
• What are the key sections in the legal assistant resume?

This blog will try to answer all your questions regarding your legal administrative assistant resume. You can also use Hiration's Online Resume Builder to simplify your resume building process.

It is armed with 100+ content templates and 25+ resume templates that you can customize to suit your specific requirements. We can also help you build your legal assistant resume cover letter.

Legal Assistant Job Description for Resume

Legal assistants interact with lawyers, courtroom staff, clients, witnesses, opposing counsel, judicial employees, and other third parties. Hence, you must be able to relate and communicate with people from all walks of life.

Following is the legal assistant job description resume list of roles & responsibilities that you might have as a legal assistant:

• Your primary task will be to help the lawyer prepare for hearings, closings, trials and other legal activities by attending to various supportive and administrative functions.
• You may be responsible for identifying judicial decisions, appropriate laws, and specific legal articles among others.
• You will be expected to be extremely detail-oriented and have exceptional writing skills.
• You will work on software like MS Office and Excel.
• You will also need to be proficient in various legal management software programs.

Legal Assistant Salary

The following major websites have quoted the following figures for a legal assistant job:

• Glassdoor: $46,452 / year
• Indeed: $15.61 / hour
• Salary.com: $43,001 to $57,016 / year

What is a Legal Assistant Resume & why do you need it?

Our world is becoming increasingly digital and to keep up you need a digital identity as well. Your legal administrative assistant resume is the identity that will help you find a job.

But why can’t you just refurbish your old traditional resume and put it online?

Well, today most recruiters and big-name companies use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to shortlist candidates.

It is a recruitment tool that ranks your resume, and this ranking determines whether or not you make the shortlist.

The higher your ranking on the ATS, the higher are your chances of getting shortlisted So, your resume must be optimized to be effective against any ATS.

We can help you build the perfect ATS-targeted legal administrative assistant resume through this blog.

Read our blog on the do’s and don’ts of writing resumes to start building your perfect legal assistant resume now.

Legal Assistant Resume Sections

To build a highly effective ATS-targeted resume, you must have the following sections in your resume:

• Header
• Personal Information
• Profile Title
• Summary/Objective
• Key Skills
• Professional Experience
• Education
• Certifications (if any)
• Awards & Recognition (if any)
• Additional Information (if any)

For more details regarding these sections, read Hiration's 2022 Guide to sections in a resume.

Looking to build your job-winning legal administrative assistant resume? Use Hiration’s Online Resume Builder to help you get results which comes with legal assistant resume templates to help guide you.

How to write your Legal Assistant Resume

Being organized will get you everywhere. Be organized while building your resume as well and follow the below-mentioned stages:

• First Stage: Master Legal Assistant Resume
• Second Stage: First draft of Legal Assistant Resume
• Third Stage: Final draft of Legal Assistant Resume

Master Legal Assistant Resume

Let’s begin building the perfect legal assistant resume. Shall we?

We start by composing a master legal assistant resume.

Here, you have to compile all your professional information in one place. By doing this you’ll not only be making your resume-building process easier but also helping your future self.

Let’s see how:

• By compiling all your information, you are making your data easily accessible. Hence, making it easier to compose a resume that is well-suited to the needs of your current target job.
• Secondly, this will help you in updating your resume in the future. By storing your information in one source you will be able to easily refer to all your old experiences and update information if or when the need arises.

First Draft of Legal Assistant Resume

For the second stage of writing your resume for a legal assistant, you need to build the first draft of your legal assistant resume. Use the master resume to pick out relevant points and compose the following sections:

• Header
• Personal Information
• Profile Title
• Education
• Certification (if any)
• Awards & Recognition (if any)
• Additional Information (if any)

Final draft of Legal Assistant Resume

Now, you have reached the third and final stage of resume-writing.

As part of this stage, you need to compose the key skills and legal assistant resume objective/summary section:

• The key skills section: This is an important section of your legal assistant resume and must be composed second to last.
• The summary or objective section: This section should be composed at the end as it will be easy to pick the highlights of your career and write a highly impactful resume legal assistant resume objectives or summaries.

Read our blog on how to write a resume to help you in your resume-writing endeavor.

Legal Assistant Resume: Header

If you want to compose a perfect legal assistant resume header, take into account the following rules:

• Do not use “CV” or “Resume” as the header of your resume, rather your full name should be the resume header of your legal assistant resume.
• Give a single space between your first name and your last name and write your resume header in the font range of 16-20 font size.
• If you have a middle name, initialize it. Example: Katie Edwin Bell should be written as Katie E. Bell.

Read Hiration’s 2022 Guide To Writing The Perfect Resume Header to compose the perfect resume header.

For resume header writing tips, view our legal assistant resume samples:

Make your resume writing hassle-free by using Hiration’s Online Resume Builder. We can also help you build your legal assistant resume cover letter.

Legal Assistant Resume: Personal Information

This section is vital as a piece of incorrect personal information may lead to a recruiter never finding a way to contact you even when they are interested.

Mention the following when composing the personal information section of your legal secretary resume:

• Updated mobile number
• Professional email address
• Location of residence

Updated Mobile Number

Mention the number you are almost always available in the following standard format:

• Use your country’s ISD code as a prefix before your phone number
• Put a plus sign (+) before the ISD code
• Write your updated mobile number after the ISD code
• Eg: +1 38723 31981.

Professional Email Address

9 out of 10 times a potential employer will use the email ID you input in your resume to get in touch with you. Hence, it does not just need to be correct but look professional too.

Draft your email address as Your_full_name@xyz.com or in a similar professional format.

For eg: if your name is Katie Bell, the appropriate e-mail handle would be katiebell@xyz.com.

Avoid using unprofessional deeming e-mail handles such as ‘dracotriedtokillme@xyz.com’.

Current Location of Residence

Adhere to the following guidelines while listing your location in a legal assistant resume:

• If the job you are applying for is in the same country, mention your city name and state name.
• If you are looking for a job in another country, mention your city name and country name.

Read more about the personal information section at Hiration's 2022 Guide to composing your contact information.

Looking for a position as a legal assistant? You’ll need the right resume, and our legal secretary resume samples can help.

Use the help of our resume writing experts to write the perfect legal administrative assistant resume through Hiration’s Online Resume Builder.

Legal Assistant Resume: Profile Title

A profile title is an important element of your resume. It is a reflection of your latest job title and tells about your seniority.

Following are the guidelines to compose the ideal profile title:

• Being the second-largest text in your resume it should be in the range of 14-16 font size.
• It appears directly below the personal information section.

Our legal assistant resume examples can help guide you in building an ideal profile title:

Get your resume evaluated today by the experts at Hiration’s Resume Review Service.

Legal Assistant Resume: Professional Experience

The professional experience section of your legal administrative assistant resume is the most important section of your resume.

Here you get a chance to dazzle the recruiter by highlighting the most important highlights of your career.

Mentioned below is a guide you can follow to distinguish this section:

• Use the STAR format when structuring the one-liner points
• Avoid using paragraphs
• Use grouping & highlighting

Read our blog on how to compose the professional experience section in your resume to understand more about composing the perfect professional experience section.

Take a look at our legal assistant resume samples, which provide a detailed description of the applicant’s previous positions and quantify their accomplishments:

STAR Format

The STAR format is a handy tool to compose the professional experience section according to the industry standards.

STAR format stands for the following:

S: Situation - The situation/context of your contributions
T: Task - Task that was assigned to you
A: Action - The action you took to fulfill the assigned task
R: Result - The results of the action in the form of an achievement figure

Through using the cause-effect relationship, you can establish the reason behind your actions and the outcome of your actions.

This makes it easy for the recruiter to comprehend the results of your contributions.

Framing Points

If you have been using paragraphs to communicate your professional experience, it’s time to break this habit.

The only goal of your resume is to get you shortlisted for an interview but if your resume fails to engage the recruiter, he might not even evaluate your resume completely.

As is famously said, an average recruiter spends less than 6 seconds on one resume. Using paragraphs discourages recruiters from reading your resume.

You certainly want to avoid that.

A simple fix is to present the same information in a more comprehensible manner by using points instead of paragraphs.

Here are two legal secretary resume samples to demonstrate this.

Example 1:

"I resolved the billing backlogs for the company going back up to 8 months which brought the accounts receivable up to date. I was responsible for supervising and managing confidential records, processes, and documents throughout 150+ legal proceedings while directly reporting to 7 lawyers. I spearheaded a team of 4 customer service representatives as well and always ensured prompt responses to phone/e-mails which led to a wait time reduction of 40% in all client interactions. I also amassed all the inbound communication including emails, phones which amounted to 20k+ per week."

Example 2:

• Managed to bring all accounts receivable up to date by resolving billing backlogs going back up to 8 months
• Supervised confidential records, processes, and documents throughout for 150+ legal proceedings
• Spearheaded a team of 4 customer service representatives to ensure prompt responses to phone/e-mail leading to a wait time reduction by 40% in all client interactions
• Handled all the inbound communication including emails, phones amounting to 20k+ per week

Framing Points Analysis

Following conclusions can be drawn by observing both legal assistant resume examples:

• While both the legal secretary resume examples are communicating the same data, legal assistant resume example 1 uses paragraphs while legal assistant resume example 2 uses points.
• Legal assistant resume example 1 is hard to read & is incomprehensible. It looks bulky and could discourage a potential recruiter from evaluating it.
• On the other hand, legal assistant resume example 2 uses points to discuss the candidate’s professional experience. Unlike legal assistant resume example 1, legal assistant resume example 2 succeeds in communicating the roles & responsibilities in a streamlined fashion.
• In conclusion, we can say that avoiding the use of paragraphs while using points to structure your resume will lead to better results.

Grouping & Highlighting

Framing points alone may fail to create an impact. However, your resume will be easy to read, it might still fail to catch the recruiter’s attention.

Make your case stronger by using grouping & highlighting.

Here are two legal assistant resume examples to demonstrate this point.

Example 1:

• Managed to bring all accounts receivable up to date by resolving billing backlogs going back up to 8 months
• Supervised confidential records, processes, and documents throughout for 150+ legal proceedings
• Spearheaded a team of 4 customer service representatives to ensure prompt responses to phone/e-mail leading to a wait time reduction by 40% in all client interactions
• Handled all the inbound communication including emails, phones amounting to 20k+ per week

Example 2:

Documentation & Billing

• Managed to bring all accounts receivable up to date by resolving billing backlogs going back up to 8 months
• Supervised confidential records, processes, and documents throughout for 150+ legal proceedings

Client Communication

• Spearheaded a team of 4 customer service representatives to ensure prompt responses to phone/e-mail leading to a wait time reduction by 40% in all client interactions
• Handled all the inbound communication including emails, phones amounting to 20k+ per week

Legal Assistant Resume: Education

You will need at least 24 credits in an associate's degree in paralegal studies or a paralegal certificate program approved by the American Bar Association.

If you have a Bachelor’s Degree in any field, you can start working as a legal assistant and get trained on the job by a lawyer.

The education section of your legal assistant resume ideally consists of the following details:

• Name of the school/university you have attended.
• Name of the pursued courses.
• Location of your school/university.
• Enrollment and graduation dates in the month and year format.

Confused about what to show in the education section of your legal assistant resume? Read Hiration's 2022 Guide on how to list education on your resume to clear all your confusions.

Take a look at our legal assistant resume samples to understand what perfect education sections should look like:

Let our resume writing experts help you get a great new job by building your legal assistant resume or legal assistant resume cover letter. Use Hiration’s Online Resume Builder now!

Legal Assistant Resume: Certifications

Why is the certification section important? Imagine two candidates with similar education & professional experience. Now one of them has listed relevant certifications. Who would you pick?

Given below is a list of what the certifications section contains:

• Name of the certification you have pursued.
• Name of the certification issuing body.
• Location of the certifying body.
• Enrollment and completion date in the month & year format.

This needs to be aligned in the format we have mentioned below:

{Name of certification} | {Affiliating Institution} | {Location} | {Date} (in month & year format)

Read Hiration's 2022 Guide on listing certifications on a resume to understand how you can distinguish yourself from other candidates.

Check out this legal assistant resume sample to understand how a perfect certifications section looks like in an ideal resume:

Unsure about your resume? Get it professionally reviewed by Hiration’s Resume Review Service before sending it to apply for your dream job.

Legal Assistant Resume: Additional Information

Any important data that does not go in other sections can be illustrated in this section. List your hobbies here or your working knowledge of multiple languages.

This legal assistant resume 2022 is full of legal secretary resume examples. The following legal assistant resume example demonstrates a perfect additional information section:

Don’t stress. Use Hiration’s Online Resume Builder to get your perfect legal administrative assistant resume.

Legal Assistant Resume Key Sections

Legal Assistant Resume: Key Skills

Revolutionize your resume by introducing relevant legal assistant skills resume.

Include industry-specific legal secretary resume keywords.

Most buzzwords, such as “team-player” or “hard-working” have already lost their meaning in the recruitment world so go through the job description to isolate relevant keywords.

Here’s a list of tips that can help you perfect the key skills section of your resume:

• Evaluate the professional experience section of your resume and pick out your legal assistant skills resume. List them down in the key skills section of your legal assistant resume.
• You should also try and optimize this section with the ATS in mind. To do this, you just have to isolate the keywords from the job description of your target job listing and introduce them here.

You can also write the perfect key skills section. Just read Hiration's 2022 Guide on what skills to put on a resume.

Use Hiration’s Resume Review Service to help you perfectly build your legal assistant resume.

Have a look at our legal assistant resume sample showing what an ideal key skills section should look like:

Legal Assistant Resume Summary

The first thing a recruiter will look for in your resume is the summary section so it should smartly summarize your professional experience.

Mentioned below are some tips to make your resume summary appealing to a recruiter:

• Your resume summary should be a short paragraph of all your legal assistant skills & achievements.
• Write a resume summary only if you have a minimum work experience of 3 years.
• You should write your resume summary at the end of your resume-building process.
• The right approach is to pick the highlights of your career from the professional experience section and replicate them in the summary section.

Following these tips will help you impress the recruiter and get you shortlisted.

Read Hiration's 2022 Resume Summary Guide to get a more detailed comprehension of the summary section.

Also, check out our legal assistant resume examples to draft an ideal resume summary:

Take help of our Online Resume Builder to build the perfect resume and the perfect legal assistant resume cover letter.

Legal Assistant Resume Objective

Similar to a resume summary, a legal assistant resume objective is just as important.

Here is a list of what your legal assistant resume objectives on an entry level legal assistant resume should accomplish:

• Your recruiter should feel that you will be the perfect fit for this position.
• The recruiter should be convinced that you have the right legal assistant skills for this position.
• The legal assistant resume objectives of your legal assistant resume with no experience should sell your legal assistant skills and achievements in a way that secures this job for you.

Draft the ideal legal assistant resume objectives for your entry level legal assistant resume with the help of our blog, Hiration's 2022 Guide on Resume Objectives.

Legal Assistant Sample

Take a look at the legal assistant resume sample below to know how a resume can strongly champion or communicate your legal assistant skills resume and experience.

Resume Review & Free Legal Assistant Resume Templates

We hope that this blog prepares you to write an ideal legal secretary resume.

If you have already drafted your resume and want to know what you can do to perfect it, get it professionally reviewed by Hiration’s Resume Review Service.

With our Resume Review Service, your legal assistant resume will be reviewed in compliance with the following parameters:

• Compliance with industry norms
• Content Relevance
• Recruiter Friendliness
• Design Compatibility
• Conversion Scope
• ATS Compliance
• Global Compatibility
• Performance Assessment
• Resume Formatting (font, margins, the order of sections, etc.)

You will also get 2 legal assistant resume templates for free!

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Online Resume Builder for Legal Assistant Resume

Our Online Resume Builder will help you build your legal administrative assistant resume which will rank high on any ATS.

Hiration’s Online Resume Builder comes with the following amazing resources:

• Option to save unlimited resumes
• 25+ resume designs
• Full rich-text editor
• Unlimited PDF downloads
• 100+ resume templates
• 1-click design change
• A shareable link
• Live resume editor

Don’t wait anymore! Get your job-winning legal assistant resume with Hiration’s Online Resume Builder now!

Key Takeaways

• Use the month and year format while writing dates in your legal assistant resume and follow this format consistently throughout the whole resume.
• In the professional experience section, use points and grouping & highlighting to enhance the readability and impact of your legal assistant resumes.
• Always use the STAR format to establish a cause-effect relationship.
• Use power verbs to begin each point.
• Power verbs should be in the past tense for past profiles and projects and the present continuous tense for present profiles and projects.
• Write a legal assistant resume objective if you have less than 3 years of work experience.
• Write a legal assistant resume summary if you have more than 3 years of work experience.

With this you have reached the end of this legal assistant resume 2022 blog. We hope we were able to help you build your perfect legal assistant resume.

You can also use Hiration’s Online Resume Builder to put you ahead of the league as it will arm you with the perfect legal secretary resumes.

Go to Hiration resume builder and create a professional resume for yourself. Additionally, reach out to us at support@hiration.com and you can get 24/7 professional assistance with all your job & career-related queries.