Barrister CV Examples & Writing Guide

"Barrister" is the England and Wales title for a lawyer who is called to the Bar by one of the four Inns of Court and spends most of their working life advising and on their feet in court, usually self-employed in chambers and instructed through solicitors. Scotland calls the same role an advocate. Solicitors with higher rights of audience (solicitor-advocates) do some of the same court work. In the United States there is no split profession: the person doing that job is a trial lawyer or a litigator, and they are admitted to a state bar.

That matters for your document. If you are applying for pupillage, for tenancy in chambers or for an employed Bar role such as the Crown Prosecution Service or an in-house legal team, you are writing a CV, and most of this page covers that. If you are applying to a US firm, you write a resume and call yourself a litigator or trial attorney; the tip below and the FAQ cover that move.

This is a self-employed barrister of nine years' call with eight years of practice, most of it in court. The name and the chambers are invented. Notice how early the call date and the trial count appear. Clerks and instructing solicitors read for exactly those two things.

Hiring at the Bar is unusually concrete. Four things decide whether your CV gets a second read, and none of them is your university once you have a few years of practice.

• Your call date and Inn, then your practising status. Add any other jurisdiction you are admitted in. If you are a pupil or waiting for a Bar Course result, say which stage you are at.
• Trial and hearing count, with your role. "Sole counsel in 19 jury trials" and "led junior in 6" are different claims and both are respected. Vague phrases like "extensive trial experience" get discounted to zero.
• The courts you actually appear in. Magistrates' courts, the Crown Court, the county court, the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the tribunals are separate worlds. Name yours.
• Practice areas in the words the vacancy or chambers profile uses. A set recruiting for personal injury will not read "general common law" as a match, even if the work overlapped.

A bullet on a barrister's CV should say what you did, in which court, and what came of it. If two of those three are missing, the line is decoration.

If you are an aspiring barrister applying through the Pupillage Gateway or directly to a set, the practitioner layout above is not your model. Many sets ask for a CV, usually two pages, and they read it alongside a long application form that does most of the persuading.

• Academics come first and stay first. Degree class, university, Bar Course grade and any scholarship from your Inn. Chambers do use grades as a first filter, more than most employers do once you are in practice.
• Advocacy evidence next: mooting, mock trials, debating, negotiation competitions, and any prizes. List the competition, the round you reached and the year.
• Mini-pupillages and marshalling, with the set or judge's court and the dates. Two or three good ones beat six listed without detail.
• Legal work experience that is not the Bar still counts: paralegal work, a law centre, Citizens Advice, FRU representation, prison law casework. Say how many cases and what you did unsupervised.
• Your Inn and the date of call if you are already called. Lincoln's Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple and Gray's Inn are the four; name yours.
• Anything that shows you can talk to strangers under pressure: teaching, sales, care work, sport at a serious level. Chambers read this as advocacy potential, not filler.

Bar Course graduates and career changers usually have more advocacy material than they think. The trick is to count it instead of describing it.

1. 1Count clinic and FRU work. A university law clinic or the Free Representation Unit gives you real tribunal hearings. Say how many hearings, in which tribunal, and what the outcomes were.
2. 2Count mooting properly: the competition name, how far you advanced, the number of oral rounds, and whether you wrote the skeleton argument.
3. 3List every mini-pupillage, marshalling week and legal placement by set, court or office, and say what you drafted and how much of it was used.
4. 4Put your status in plain words at the top: "Called to the Bar (Inner Temple), July 2026" or "Bar Course completed 2026; pupillage starting September 2027."
5. 5Add pro bono hours with a number. Pupillage committees notice them, and 120 documented hours of housing advice work is a credential.
6. 6Keep the CV to one page until you have real practice to describe. Nobody wants two pages from someone who has not yet started pupillage.

A practising barrister's CV is usually two pages; a pupillage CV is one or two. Larger employers such as the CPS and in-house legal teams use online application systems, so keep the layout simple: no columns, no headshot, no graphics. Pupillage applications through the Gateway are form-based, so the form, not the layout, carries your case there.

• Give your call its own heading, such as "Call and Practising Status". Do not bury your call date inside education, because readers look for it first.
• Mirror the vacancy's practice area words: personal injury, clinical negligence, crime, employment, family, regulatory, commercial chancery. Generic "common law" matches less well than you would hope.
• Name your research and court systems: Westlaw, Lexis+, Practical Law, the Crown Court Digital Case System, CE-File, CaseLines. These are searched for by name.
• UK convention: no photo, no date of birth, no marital status, and "CV" rather than "resume", which is the US word.
• Keep a separate one-page list of notable cases for interviews. It is a stronger document than a padded CV and clerks and solicitors often ask for it.

“I want the trial number and I want to know whether you were sole counsel. Half the CVs I see say "significant courtroom experience" and when you ask in the interview it turns out to be sitting behind someone for two weeks. Just write the number. Nobody minds a small number honestly stated.”