Landing a work-study position in business law or within a legal department requires a resume that reassures recruiters about both your legal skills and your ability to be immediately operational. Here's how to structure it for a first or second-year Master's law student.
Legal skills to highlight
A legal department or law firm hiring a work-study student is primarily checking that your legal foundation is solid enough to be applied quickly, without constant supervision. The skills to emphasize vary depending on the specialty targeted:
- Business law / corporate law: drafting routine documents (meeting minutes, bylaws), monitoring entities' corporate life
- Contract law: reviewing and drafting clauses, negotiating standard terms
- Labor law: following disciplinary procedures, monitoring changes to labor law
- Compliance and GDPR: awareness of regulatory obligations, if the role touches on compliance
Beyond your area of specialty, two cross-cutting skills are always expected: precise legal writing (a lawyer who writes poorly stands out immediately) and the ability to explain a legal point clearly to non-lawyers.
Structuring a legal work-study resume
The structure of a resume for this type of role stays classic, but each section should be designed for a work-study candidate without long professional experience:
- Header: identity, level of study targeted (M1 or M2), legal specialty
- Education: university path with the dominant subjects of each year, honors if relevant
- Experience: legal internships, student jobs, even short ones - each should demonstrate a transferable skill
- Relevant coursework and academic projects: mock trials, moot court competitions, theses or legal clinic work
- Skills and languages: legal software (Lexisnexis, Dalloz), legal English level, possibly another language
💼 For comparison with a finance profile in a work-study program, our finance work-study resume guide follows a similar logic of highlighting transferable skills for a candidate without long experience.
Highlighting relevant coursework and academic projects
For a candidate in their first or second Master's year without a long internship at a firm or company, academic work becomes a real differentiator - as long as it's presented as an achievement rather than a simple list of courses taken:
- "Wrote a research thesis on [specific topic], supervised by [Professor], defended with [X] honors"
- "Participated in the university's legal clinic: provided free legal advice to associations on labor law questions"
- "Finalist in the [Name] moot court competition, on a contract law case study"
- "Corporate law coursework: drafted 5 standard legal documents (bylaws, meeting minutes) as part of the curriculum"
Properly worded, these items demonstrate concrete legal practice rather than purely theoretical knowledge - exactly what a recruiter is trying to verify in a work-study candidate.
Annotated resume example for a first or second-year law Master's student
Excerpt from a resume for a candidate in an M1 Business Law program targeting a work-study position in a legal department:
EDUCATION
2025-2026 - Master 1 Business Law, [Name] University
Dominant subjects: corporate law, contract law, competition law
2022-2025 - Law Bachelor's Degree, [Name] University, Honors
EXPERIENCE
Summer 2025 - Legal intern, Legal Department [Company], 8 weeks
Drafted 15+ standard contracts, weekly legal watch on corporate law
2024 - Student job, volunteer legal assistant, [University] Legal Clinic
Advised on 10+ labor law cases for local associations
ACADEMIC PROJECTS
2025 - M1 thesis: "[Specific topic related to the targeted specialty]," Honors
2024 - Semi-finalist, [University Name] moot court competition
This format highlights both practical experience (internship, legal clinic) and concrete academic achievements, which offsets the lack of long professional experience typical of a work-study profile.
⚠️ Watch out: avoid listing your university courses without linking them to a skill or concrete achievement - a course title alone ("Corporate Law, semester 2") gives the recruiter no useful information.
Once your resume is finalized, the next step is applying through the right channels: specialized platforms, alumni networks, and professional associations like the French Association of In-House Lawyers (AFJE) 🔗, whose Young Lawyers network regularly organizes events useful for a student early in their career.
Building a clear, error-free legal resume that presents your coursework as real achievements takes time better spent on substance than on layout. FinanceCV lets you generate a professional, readable resume in just a few minutes, with a format directly compatible with the applicant tracking systems used by many legal departments and law firms.
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