Law School Resume: Keep It to One Column and One Page

Use one column, one page, and lead with education. That is the entire format for your law school resume. The rest of this post gives you the evidence for those three choices and the detail you need to fill each section.

This is not just about looking neat. Your résumé will pass through software before a person sees it. Application portals extract your text, and the firms you apply to during your 1L summer run it through the same kind of parser. A formatting decision that looks fine on your screen can scramble the document that actually gets read.

This post covers the questions that come up every application cycle: columns, page count, section order, photos, and the formatting details that decide whether your record arrives intact. If you are short on time, the first two sentences are your answer. If you want to see what we measured and how it changes what you put on the page, keep reading.

Single column

Two-column templates put the main body on one side and a narrow strip of skills or contact details on the other. On screen, the layout looks tidy. The problem is what happens next. A parser reads the page as a single stream of text and has to decide which line follows which. When it guesses wrong, your sidebar drops into the middle of your work history.

For an admissions file, that can mean your GPA lands between two unrelated job titles. For a firm's system during your 1L search, it means a garbled record with no context. Nobody is there to untangle it for you.

We did not take this on faith. We built two sidebar designs and widened the gap between the columns in steps, reading the extracted text after each pass.

At 76pt the gap was roughly three times the space between columns in an academic paper. The parser still folded the sidebar into the body text. So we deleted two of our own designs. A finding that costs you two products is not one you argue with. Stick to a single column.

One page

You are a student or a recent graduate. You do not have decades of work to account for. A second page on a law school application does not show thoroughness; it shows that you could not decide what mattered. Keep your résumé to one page and make every line earn its place.

What do you cut first? High school. Remove it entirely before you shorten anything from college. If you are still over a page, tighten your bullet points rather than shrinking the font. Text below 10pt punishes the person reading your résumé without saving you meaningful space.

Margins help too. You can bring them down to about half an inch on each side and still keep the page comfortable to read. Go tighter and the text starts to look cramped. Our guide on how long a resume should be covers where the line falls for different career stages.

Education first on your law school resume

A work résumé leads with experience. Yours should not. You are applying on the strength of your academic record, so education goes first, directly under your name and contact line.

List your university, major, GPA and graduation date. Include class rank or honours if you have them, on the same line or the one below. Relevant coursework can appear here, but keep it to one line. Two courses that connect to law carry more weight than a block of six that do not.

Is your GPA below a number you feel comfortable showing? You can leave it off. But a blank where a number should be invites its own questions. When your GPA is strong, display it. When it is not, let your personal statement and your LSAT do the work.

The sections you need

Strip your résumé down to four sections, top to bottom:

• Education: university, major, GPA, graduation date, class rank or honours.
• Experience: internships, jobs and research positions, most recent first.
• Leadership and activities: clubs and volunteering, especially anything you organised or led.
• Skills and interests: languages and certifications, plus a brief line of genuine interests.

Notice what is missing. No objective statement and no photo. No prose paragraph explaining who you are. Your personal statement already handles that.

The interests line is your one chance to sound like a person rather than an application. 'Long-distance running and used bookstores' does that. 'Law and hard work' does not.

In the Experience section, every bullet should start with a verb and carry a result. Do not describe your role. Show what changed because you held it.

Organised a 200-person mock trial tournament, coordinating 14 teams across two days.
Researched case law for three appellate briefs, cutting prep time from 12 hours to 7.

Responsible for managing social media accounts and creating content for the club.

Managed two social media channels, growing event attendance from 40 to 120 over one semester.

The first version names a duty. The second names a result you can count. If you cannot find a result for a campus role, ask yourself what would not have happened without you. The answer is your bullet. Build every one on that pattern and your single page will carry far more than a two-page list of responsibilities.

Keep your headings clean

Bold text or a slightly larger font is enough to mark a section heading. Do not add wide letter-spacing to stretch a heading across the page.

We found that letter-spacing above 0.6px on a small sans-serif heading caused pdftotext to split it into individual characters. A heading that reads EDUCATION on your screen can arrive as nine disconnected letters in the extracted text. Keep your headings bold and left-aligned, with no extra spacing.

Leave the photo off

Some templates ship with a headshot placeholder. Skip it. You will not miss it, and your résumé will not look empty without one.

You may have heard that a photo breaks the parsing. We tested this. We rendered the same Word file twice, once with a headshot and once without, then compared the extracted text field by field.

All six fields came through intact: name, email, phone, titles, dates and skills.

The only visible shift was the name, which moved by one character in the text stream. Nothing broke. But the reason to skip the photo has nothing to do with software. An admissions office that sees your face before reading your record has to guard against a bias claim. Removing the photo removes that risk for you and for them.

None of this is a trick. A law school résumé that works is a clean, single-column, one-page document with education on top. Start there. If you want a template that already holds that shape, our classic template is built for it. Fill it in, hold it to one page, and put the hours you save back into your personal statement.