How Do I Explain A Gap In My Resume
[00:00:00] How do I explain a gap in my resume?
There are different ways to explain gaps in your resume. If you're a female, law firms are very used to women taking time off for family-related reasons, or to have kids.
For men, it can be a little bit more difficult if you have a gap in your resume, cause you can't explain it that way.
Typically, when you explain a gap in your resume, you need to make it seem positive. So you can do things like talk about needing to take care of a parent or taking a trip. Sometimes you may talk about health problems and things. But the problem is anytime you have a gap in your resume, you have to remember that the same firms that are talking to you are also going to be talking to other people as well. They're talking to other candidates and they're going to be talking to other attorneys as well that may not have gaps in their resume.
So, a gap in your resume always needs to seem like a very positive thing. If there's a way to make a positive and it's difficult. Anytime you have a gap in your resume you need some way to explain it, that seems positive. Something to do with upward mobility.
[00:01:00] Now, law firms can go out of business. So you could work at a law firm where you bought a business. You could potentially have another issue, which may be something like I don't know, a department closed down in your law firm or they laid everyone off because of a pandemic. Who knows, but explaining things that way could be helpful.
But, generally, the gap is going to be an issue. Now, the problem is anytime you have negatives, which is as, senior attorney, various firms, fellow practitioners, the gaps, all that means is it just affects the quality of employer you can get into. So, it typically affects the quality of the employer and nothing else.
All that stuff can be overcome. I know, some very well-known attorneys that have had lots of bad things happen to them. I knew one attorney that was now a partner in a major us law firm, he was a partner in a big law firm in Los Angeles, then he went to work as a commissioner of the FCC, and then it turned out that he was married to two women at the same time or something, and became a national news story.
And he had a gap of several years.
[00:02:00] I got him a job at a smaller firm. Then, after that, moved into a larger firm. All gap means is if you have a gap you can't start, is it many times this is a good a firm as you would otherwise. That's the only thing to remember, but you can always fix it later on.
Everything's fixable, by the way. A lot of times people think that one mistake is fatal and the thing is, if you're, 25 years old when you come out of law school I know I'm being represented right now in a matter by an attorney that I think is in his mid-eighties. So that's out of law school, so you can practice for a long time and any early mistakes that you make in your career can be fixed.
I know lots of very old attorneys, I once placed an attorney that had a multimillion-dollar book of business. It was in the seventies, I think, late seventies. One of the things I would say is don't take anything that happens with a grain of salt, especially early in your career.
Even if you're in your fifties I know plenty of attorneys that are in their fifties and they've had issues and sixties, and you can recover.
[00:03:00] So don't take all this stuff too long-term. Don't define yourself by early career mistakes. Sometimes having early career mistakes is a blessing because it makes you appreciate the things that come later.
