Legal Specialist Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for a Legal Specialist position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Legal Specialist may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of a Legal Specialist and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that employers commonly feature Communication Skills and Litigating as the most prominent terms in their Legal Specialist job descriptions, yet those who have held the position of Legal Specialist and list it on their resume indicate Customer Service and Legal Documents more predominantly. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to Legal Specialist jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be a Legal Specialist or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Legal Specialist positions. The top three keywords make up 36.72% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how Communication Skills, Litigating, and Detail Oriented shares stack up against the share from resumes. Compliance, Collaboration and MS Office represent an additionally healthy share of the employer Legal Specialist job postings with their combined total of 31.6%. At 31.68%, Drafting, Legal Documents, Innovation, and Paralegal appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Legal Specialist skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Legal Specialist positions. The top three keywords represent 36.23% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Customer Service, Legal Documents, and Legal Research match up to employer job descriptions. Compliance, MS Office, and Paralegal represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Legal Specialist with 30.3% of the total. At 33.47%, Litigating, Drafting, Database, and Scheduling appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Legal Specialist skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Legal Specialist job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Legal Specialist on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Legal Specialist positions. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within Legal Specialist job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Employer job listings often list Innovation, Paralegal Certificate, Legal Support or Communication Skills as requirements in Legal Specialist job descriptions; however, candidates mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Legal Specialist position may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the position of Legal Specialist tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Detail Oriented, Collaboration, Analysis, Accuracy, Litigating, Compliance, Documentation, Drafting, Legal Assistance, MS Office, Database, Paralegal, Scheduling, Legal Documents or Data Entry in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a candidate you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as a Legal Specialist.

Employer job listings seldom list Legal Research, Customer Service, Microsoft Excel, Calendaring, English Speaking or Judicial as important skills or qualifications in Legal Specialist job descriptions. Nevertheless, candidates mention them much more commonly in their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Legal Specialist position may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as a Legal Specialist. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!