Solicitor CV Examples & Writing Guide

A mid-level associate CV for a commercial litigation solicitor at a regional firm (names and firms are made up). Admission and practising status sit right under the header, the personal statement names the practice area and matter types, and every job has counts. That is how a hiring partner reads.

Law firm hiring is done by lawyers, and lawyers skim. Four things decide whether your CV reaches the interview pile.

• Admission and PQE. When were you admitted, in which jurisdiction (England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate legal professions), and do you hold a current practising certificate? Your admission year is how firms count seniority as post-qualification experience, or PQE (a 2020 qualifier has about six years' PQE). If you are dual-qualified, for example in Ireland or New York, say so.
• Practice area and matter type. "Solicitor" says nothing. "Commercial litigation associate, contract and construction disputes, County Court and Business and Property Courts, 15 contested applications" tells them whether you can run a caseload on day one.
• Degree, classification and route. Firms still look at the university, the degree class (2:1 or First), A-level grades for junior roles, mooting and prizes, and your route to qualification (LPC and training contract, or SQE and qualifying work experience). After about eight years the matters matter more than the grades, but the line still needs to be there.
• Evidence of responsibility. Trials, hearings, applications argued, deals closed, clients you manage directly. A CV that lists tasks ("conducted legal research") without counts reads like a trainee's CV no matter how many years it covers.

“I read the admission line, then the school line, then I look for a number: depositions, trials, deals, whatever the practice is. If a fifth-year cannot tell me how many depositions they have taken, I assume the answer is not many.”

Give your qualification its own short "Admission" line right below the header or after the personal statement. Include the jurisdiction, the year you were admitted and your status (current practising certificate). Add higher rights of audience and any other jurisdiction where you are qualified. Firms check admission on the SRA's Solicitors Register, so your SRA number is optional.

• Required: admission as a solicitor and a current practising certificate for any job that involves reserved legal activities, such as conducting litigation or appearing in court. Higher rights of audience are needed to act as an advocate in the higher courts and are a plus otherwise.
• Good to add: other jurisdictions where you are qualified (Ireland, New York and other common-law systems), an accredited mediator qualification, Law Society accreditation where it exists for your area, and membership of specialist associations in your practice area.
• Do not list SQE1, SQE2 or the LPC as certifications once you are admitted. "Passed the exams" is implied by "Admitted".

Most trainee and newly qualified CVs keep the personal statement to two lines and move straight to qualification status and education. Once you have three or more years' PQE, a three-line personal statement saves the reader from adding up your matters. Use a career objective only if you are newly qualified or switching practice area. Line one always names the practice area, the PQE and the jurisdiction.

Lawyers write bullets the way they write client care letters: general and cautious. A hiring partner wants the opposite. Count the hearings and applications, name the court, give the claim value or deal value, and say what happened. Client names stay confidential unless the matter is public; the numbers do not.

Legal CVs traditionally had no skills section. Now most firms and nearly every in-house legal team run CVs through an applicant tracking system, so a short skills block (8 to 12 items) helps you get found. List only skills that can be tested in an interview.

• Litigation: statements of case, applications, skeleton arguments, witness statements, disclosure, trial preparation, advocacy at interim hearings, appeals, e-disclosure, the Civil Procedure Rules and Practice Directions, pre-action protocols.
• Transactional: contract drafting and negotiation, M&A due diligence, share and asset purchase agreements, disclosure letters, finance documents, company formation and Companies House filings, equity capital markets work if you do it.
• In-house and regulatory: commercial contracts (MSAs, SaaS, DPAs), data protection (UK GDPR, Data Protection Act 2018, EU GDPR), employment advice, corporate governance under the Companies Act 2006, compliance programme design, litigation management and external counsel budgets.
• Tools: Westlaw UK, Lexis+ UK, Practical Law; e-disclosure in Relativity, Everlaw or DISCO; iManage or NetDocuments; Clio or LEAP (smaller firms), Aderant or Elite 3E (billing), Ironclad or DocuSign CLM (in-house); CE-File for electronic filing in the High Court.
• Soft skills hiring partners actually screen for: client care, judgement under deadline, supervising paralegals and trainees, business development for senior roles, and a second language where the client base needs it.

Leave out generic items like "attention to detail" or "critical thinking". A solicitor CV with a typo says more about attention to detail than the phrase ever could.

A solicitor "with no experience" is really a candidate with law school, clinic and paralegal experience, and firms hire on exactly that. Your CV for a training contract, a paralegal role that counts as qualifying work experience or a first NQ job should be one to two pages and lead with education, in the format your university careers service recommends.

1. 1Header: name, phone, email and town or city. No photo, no date of birth, no full home address. Add no letters after your name until you are admitted.
2. 2Qualification line: "SQE1 passed January 2026; SQE2 booked for April 2027; 14 months of qualifying work experience completed", or "Training contract completed August 2026; admission expected November 2026". Recruiters look for this before anything else.
3. 3Education first: university, degree and classification (or predicted class), the conversion course (GDL or PGDL) if you took one, SQE preparation or LPC, A-level grades if they help, prizes, mooting and law clinic work. Then earlier qualifications in one line.
4. 4Experience: vacation schemes, paralegal roles, law clinic casework, judicial marshalling and research assistant roles, in reverse order. Two to three bullets each with counts (files handled, documents drafted, hearings attended and your role in them).
5. 5Bottom: languages, publications (student articles count), memberships such as your university law society. A short interests line is common in the UK; keep it specific.

Legal hiring is formal. Large firms recruit through their own careers portals and specialist legal recruitment agencies; in-house legal teams use whatever applicant tracking system the company uses, often Workday. The file is parsed into fields first, and then read by a lawyer who notices every formatting choice.

• Length: two pages for most solicitors, which is the UK norm; trainees and NQs can use one page. Partners and senior in-house lawyers stay at two pages and put the detail in a separate "Representative matters" list or deal sheet. US firms are stricter and expect a one-page resume through about seven or eight years of practice.
• Order for experienced solicitors: header, personal statement, admission and practising status, experience, education, skills and languages, publications and speaking. Order for students and NQs: header, qualification status, education, experience, skills.
• Style: one column, 11-point serif or plain sans-serif, standard margins, no colour, no icons, no photo, no date of birth, no marital status. US firms call the same document a resume and list state bar admissions where you list your admission in England and Wales; the content rules are otherwise close.
• Keywords to mirror from the advert: the practice area exactly as written ("complex commercial litigation", "corporate and M&A"), the courts named (Business and Property Courts, Technology and Construction Court), the PQE band they ask for ("3 to 5 years' PQE"), "advocacy", "due diligence", and the software they name (Relativity, iManage, Clio).
• Save as PDF (Marcus-Delgado-CV.pdf). A cover letter is still expected at most firms; address it to the recruitment manager or hiring partner by name. For lateral moves through an agency, the recruiter usually sends the CV with their own summary.

Before you send it, paste the advert into the cvplex ATS checker with your file. It catches a court or practice area the advert mentions that you left out, a phrase you wrote differently, and headings the parser could not read.