Chief Legal Officer Resume Example & Writing Guide
Use this Chief Legal Officer resume example and guide to improve your career and write a powerful resume that will separate you from the competition.
Legal departments play a crucial role in every organization—they’re the gatekeepers of an organization’s legal affairs, providing guidance and counsel on everything from contracts to intellectual property rights. And because they’re so important to the success of a company, legal departments tend to be well-resourced and staffed by professionals with years of experience in their field.
Legal officers work closely with other departments like HR and marketing to understand how new policies or initiatives will affect the company as a whole. They also collaborate with outside counsel to ensure legal compliance across all areas of the business. And because legal departments tend to be large and complex, legal officers must be organized, detail-oriented, and able to juggle multiple projects at once.
Ready to take your legal career to the next level? Here are some tips plus an example to follow when writing your own legal officer resume.
How to Write a Chief Legal Officer Resume
Here’s how to write a resume of your own.
Write Compelling Bullet Points
When you’re writing bullet points, it can be tempting to focus on the responsibilities of your job. But that’s not enough to make a compelling case for why you’re the right candidate for the job.
Instead, you should focus on the results of your work. For example, rather than saying you “managed legal department budgets,” you could say you “reduced department budget by 15% while increasing staff by 10%, resulting in a net increase in department revenue of 15%.”
The second bullet point paints a much clearer picture of what you did and the results of your work. And that’s what hiring managers want to see!
Identify and Include Relevant Keywords
When you submit your resume for a chief legal officer role, it’s likely that it will be scanned by an applicant tracking system (ATS) for certain keywords. These programs look for certain terms related to the position like “corporate law” or “employment law” in order to determine whether your skills and experience are a match for the job. If your resume doesn’t include enough of the right keywords, the ATS might filter out your application before a recruiter ever sees it.
To make sure this doesn’t happen, use this list of common chief legal officer keywords as a starting point:
- Corporate Governance
- Legal Advice
- Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)
- Commercial Litigation
- Legal Research
- Shareholder Agreements
- Legal Compliance
- Corporate Law
- Due Diligence
- Contract Negotiation
- Dispute Resolution
- Intellectual Property
- Cross-border Transactions
- Labor and Employment Law
- Joint Ventures
- Corporate Governance & Compliance
- Legal Issues
- Competition Law
- Arbitration
- Privacy Law
- Tax Law
- Legal Writing
- Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Due Diligence Preparation
- Civil Litigation
- Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) Transactions
- Trials
- Commercial Contracts
- Property Law
- Litigation
Showcase Your Technical Skills
As a chief legal officer, you will need to be proficient in a variety of software programs and systems in order to effectively manage your work. These programs will allow you to keep track of deadlines, cases, and clients. Additionally, you will need to be able to use technology to communicate with other members of the legal team, including paralegals and lawyers.
Some of the programs and systems that chief legal officers are typically expected to be proficient in include: case management software, document management software, time tracking software, and billing software.