General counsel resume example
A person in this job is a company’s top lawyer: leads the legal team and advises the CEO and board. Below: an example to start from, and what 112 open postings for this work ask for today.
Alex Example
General counsel
City, Country · [email protected]
Summary
General counsel with five years of experience in legal and compliance. Strongest in anti-money-laundering, customer due diligence and policy writing.
Skills
anti-money-laundering, customer due diligence, policy writing, regulatory reporting
Experience
General counsel, Example Company 2022 – now
- Took the anti-money-laundering programme through a regulator’s inspection with no findings
- Reviewed about 70 customer files a week with 99% accuracy at audit
- Filed 120 suspicious activity reports a year, every one inside the deadline
General counsel, Another Example Ltd 2020 – 2022
- Rewrote 15 policies and trained 400 employees on them
Education
Bachelor’s degree, Example University 2016 – 2020
Example. The person, the employers and the numbers are invented; replace them with yours.
What employers ask for
Postings for this work rarely name tools. They describe duties, so show results in the same words the posting uses for its duties.
Titles employers use
Head of Legal; General Counsel; Deputy General Counsel; Head of Legal & Compliance; Senior Director, Legal - Global Privacy & Data Counsel; Director, Legal Operations.
Make it yours
- Keep the form, change every fact. A verb first, what changed, one number.
- Use the posting’s words. The match checker shows which of them your resume lacks.
- Put the strongest result first. The resume review tells you what a first read finds.
How to write a general counsel resume
- One column, standard headings. Summary, Skills, Experience, Education: screening software reads these in order; tables, icons and two columns can come out scrambled.
- Every line: action, tool, result. “Built a churn dashboard in Tableau from SQL data; weekly reporting went from two days to one hour.” A verb first, the tool the posting names, one number.
- Send it as a PDF unless the form asks for Word. Name the file with your name and the role.
Check it before you send: the resume checker and the match against a posting.
Questions about a general counsel resume
- Which skills should a general counsel resume list?
- What the work consists of: anti-money-laundering, customer due diligence, policy writing, regulatory reporting. Postings for this work describe duties more than tools, so use the posting’s own words for each duty and put a result next to it.
- How long should it be?
- One page for up to ten years of experience, two at most. The first third of the first page decides whether the rest is read.
- Is this example a real person?
- No. The name, the employers and the numbers are invented to show the form: a verb first, one result, one number. Replace every line with your own.
- How do I write a general counsel resume with no experience?
- Put projects, an internship, volunteer or part-time work where the jobs would go, each with what you did and one number, and the skills the postings ask for near the top.
- Is a general counsel a high salary?
- Today’s general counsel postings that state a yearly range advertise a median of $280K. Most employers here are technology companies, so this runs above the wider market.
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