Consider the paragraph below:
As a paralegal in the Dispute Resolution department at STRIVE LLP, I carried out important tasks such as bundling, billing, due diligence, updating financial spreadsheets and redacting documents. I also liaised with other departments of the firm when assisting clients, and also handled client queries where associates and partners did not have the capacity to do so.
How does this sound to you? Good, or not so good? Why?
I would say that this answer is not good. While you might believe that there was a decent amount of detail, there is another issue with it: that it is too task-based, and not sufficiently context-based.
What I mean by this is that you are bringing the reader’s mind to the granular, day-to-day tasks of what you were up to. There are two issues with this approach (what I call the ‘task-based’ approach):
- Even if you were in this particular role for, say, as long as three years, this approach does not reward that. Presumably, you are going to be doing the same tasks (e.g. due diligence, bundling etc), over and over again, across all different projects. We therefore need a different approach that provides you well-deserved recognition for working on different projects across your role.
- It doesn’t sound impressive - any Dispute Resolution paralegal would be expected to perform bundling, billing, due diligence tasks etc. You are simply stating the general role description of a DR paralegal, which anyone could guess simply by reading the role ‘DR paralegal‘. If you are saying something the reader could’ve guessed, your words are not adding value and therefore are a waste of precious word count!
How might you improve this? Simply zoom out of your granular focus on tasks, into a more high-level, context-based approach.
What this means is that, rather than saying what you were doing, saying WHY you were doing it. What was the deal you were working on? This is not to say that you shouldn’t mention you were doing due diligence, but you need to encapsulate that task within the grander context of the wider deal. For example, rather than focusing on the fact that you were doing some due diligence work, focus on the fact that you were part of the high-profile acquisition of Sunflower Ltd by Venus Ltd valued at £300m within the retail sector, which was fraught with competition complications along with employment, tax, loan finance and capital markets. Contrast the paragraph below to the one above:
I was involved in the high-profile acquisition of Sunflower Ltd by Venus Ltd valued at £300m within the retail sector, which was fraught with competition complications along with employment, tax, loan finance and capital markets. As part of the due diligence process, I reviewed 3,000 documents within 2 days, as the first layer of human review after the documents underwent an AI-driven sorting process to determine their relevance to negotiation of the purchase price.
I like to think of this as ‘milking’ your experience or ‘beefing it up’ - even though you weren’t the partner who drafted the SPA that was signed at the M&A closing, doesn’t mean you weren’t an integral part of it (and that you shouldn’t claim credit for being part of it)!
As a final note, this applies to any competency question where you are evidencing your skillset with your experience, whether it be working in a law firm as part of a vac scheme, or working in a committee of a society at uni.
This approach should also be applied to CVs - it’ll add multitudes of ‘oomph’ to your work experience, promise!
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