You can. “Do It Yourself”can be a great option.
But not always.
“Before you started working on my résumé, I would have given my version a solid B. Now that I’ve seen what you’ve done, I give myself a D.”
“I am grateful for undergoing this process, and very much appreciate the results from having done so. Your services are the best investment I could have made in myself at this time.”
One of our flagship goals is to produce a better legal résumé, in less time, and with less frustration for you. To accomplish that goal, we’ve created numerous free or low-cost options that help you to work on your own:
We encourage you to check out those offerings. Some of you will find everything you need to answer your legal career questions among those resources.
Others will find only part of what you need. Although we’ve worked hard to provide high quality stand-alone options, the simple reality is that no articles, books, or blog posts can replace the give-and-take and nuanced conversation that comes with working directly with a career coach or résumé writer. Some of you, therefore, may want to supplement your self-paced work with our résumé writing or coaching.
Some of you will find that time you spend learning how to write and format a targeted legal résumé, learning about branding statements and keywords, learning what legal recruiters and employers look for and like, learning how to position yourself and your experience to appeal to employers, figuring out how to think about the next stage of your legal career… all those hours are taken away from the things you do best and the things you want to do.
We’ve already invested those hours, bringing years of experience in law practice, legal hiring, résumé writing, and career advising so that you don’t need to.
Professionally written legal career documents and professional career advice are investments.
“You’ve saved me hours and hours of work — and I still never would have gotten there on my own.”
Consider the economics of a job search. A successful job search is the grand conjunction of the right employer, the right opportunity at the right terms, and the right candidate all coming together at the right time.
“I received a two-level promotion using the résumé.”
Conventional wisdom holds it can take one month of stealth job searching for every $10,000 in salary you earn. Top-level or highly specialized attorneys can take years to find the right fit because of the limited availability of positions that meet their criteria. One purple squirrel client mused, “There are probably only 20 jobs for me in the entire country.” After a pause, he revised: “No, probably fewer.” Because he was comfortably and securely employed, he chose to position himself to take advantage of the rare opportunities that interested him, rather than to widen his search to consider other positions.
But let’s start with a straight-forward example of an attorney with an annual salary of $52,000 who suddenly becomes unemployed. Let’s say he’s using a self-written legal résumé and hasn’t sought advice on his job search. That self-directed job search with a self-written résumé costs him $1,000 in lost income every week he’s unemployed. In six months, the self-written résumé has cost him $26,000. If he works with us and secures employment at his customary salary in half the time, then professional career advice with a professionally written legal résumé saved him $12,000 in lost income.
If you earn $52,000 per year and find employment just one week sooner than you otherwise would have, then your investment in your new legal résumé and other career services has already paid for itself. If you get a job just two weeks earlier, then working with a professional is one of the best investments you’ve ever made.
If you earn $250,000, then every extra week of a job search costs you about $5,000. Your investment in quality career services can pay for itself and start making you money in as little as one day.
If you earn $400,000 or more, then even an investment in programmatic bespoke résumé services can pay for itself by lunchtime.