Lateral Resume Advice (3rd Year Transactional) Forum

(Deciding to leave, same firm different office, Reference requests)
Anonymous User
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Lateral Resume Advice (3rd Year Transactional)

Post by Anonymous User » Fri Jan 10, 2020 2:40 pm

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.

Anonymous User
Posts: 428105
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2009 9:32 am

Re: Lateral Resume Advice (3rd Year Transactional)

Post by Anonymous User » Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:58 pm

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.

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