I'm a 3rd year transactional associate at a regional firm in a secondary market. In the next 6 months, I'm looking to relocate to a different secondary market closer to where I grew up. I do both business & real estate transactions. I'll be initially targeting more national/"big law" firms.
Since I'm targeting national firms, and coming from a regional firm, I feel like I need to communicate the level of sophistication of the transactions I handle. Any recommendations on how to do that? From a resume standpoint, is the best measure of sophistication type of debt/equity financing? Size/price of transaction? Deal structure? Also, any recommendation for experience points I should try to include on my resume? My current job resulted from my 2L summer role, so I've never had to make an attorney resume.
Lateral Resume Advice (3rd Year Transactional) Forum
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- Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2009 9:32 am
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- Posts: 428442
- Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2009 9:32 am
Re: Lateral Resume Advice (3rd Year Transactional)
Answer below, but can you work on making some friendly contacts in that market now? Nothing you do formatting-wise will beat having someone to pass your resume on for you.
You can do deal sheets that you submit with your resume where you list a rough number of deals you've done, how often, the size, type, etc. When I had to submit a resume somewhere without an easy way to include this (in-house usually), I had a different resume that included a bullet point saying something about avg. deal size, how many, or how much money our deals totaled.
Typically for me this was avg. portfolio size by dollar or property/entity numbers, amount/number closed that year, or loans/refis in dollars, possibly noting special circumstances we worked through. Sometimes a leasing version of the above, or maybe doing it to highlight which deals included offerings. So tailored it a bit depending on the position I was applying for. Got plenty of interviews with firms and for in-house counsel and seemed to work.
Tried to use rest of my resume to indicate that I managed deals (scheduling, advising clients, directing staff are hard to show off with just a sale price) as well as handling general docs and complex drafting issues.
Lateraled as a 2nd and 3rd year. Commercial real estate and the accompanying corporate work is my background so seems like you are in a similar situation.
You can do deal sheets that you submit with your resume where you list a rough number of deals you've done, how often, the size, type, etc. When I had to submit a resume somewhere without an easy way to include this (in-house usually), I had a different resume that included a bullet point saying something about avg. deal size, how many, or how much money our deals totaled.
Typically for me this was avg. portfolio size by dollar or property/entity numbers, amount/number closed that year, or loans/refis in dollars, possibly noting special circumstances we worked through. Sometimes a leasing version of the above, or maybe doing it to highlight which deals included offerings. So tailored it a bit depending on the position I was applying for. Got plenty of interviews with firms and for in-house counsel and seemed to work.
Tried to use rest of my resume to indicate that I managed deals (scheduling, advising clients, directing staff are hard to show off with just a sale price) as well as handling general docs and complex drafting issues.
Lateraled as a 2nd and 3rd year. Commercial real estate and the accompanying corporate work is my background so seems like you are in a similar situation.