How to write a lawyer CV after a law firm collapse

What happened at Weil Gotshal, and why does your CV need work now?

On October 28, 2026, the management committee of Weil, Gotshal & Manges recommended that the partnership pursue an orderly wind-down, and the partners still had to vote on it formally. The 95-year-old firm had roughly 1,200 lawyers and more than $2 billion in revenue last year. Even so, more than 30 partners left during 2026, and merger talks with a rival firm fell through. Two days later it was reported that Crosby, an AI-first law firm, had submitted a letter of intent for some of Weil's assets, including its brand and trademark, and was also trying to hire some of its lawyers. For everyone else the practical news is simpler: hundreds of associates, counsel and staff are hitting the market at the same time.

Associates and staff have been told they'll keep getting paid for 90 days and will still receive year-end bonuses. That's real breathing room, but it's also a countdown. Every rival firm's recruiting team knows the timeline, legal recruiters' inboxes are filling up, and in-house teams are suddenly getting a dozen near-identical Weil profiles for a single opening. When that many candidates share the same pedigree, the firm name stops doing the work for you. Three things set you apart: how specific your matters are, how clearly your practice focus comes across, and whether your document gets through the applicant tracking system that most corporate legal departments, and plenty of firms, now use to sort applications.

Here's the uncomfortable part. Plenty of BigLaw associates haven't touched their CV since summer associate recruiting, because lateral moves usually went through a recruiter who reformatted everything anyway. That habit won't hold up when the market is this crowded. Recruiters will triage, and in-house roles mostly come through online applications where nobody repackages your experience for you. So treat the next two weeks as a rebuild, not an update. Gather your deal sheet, your matter list and your bar admissions in one place. Decide whether you're aiming for another firm or for an in-house role, and plan to write two versions rather than one. The rest of this guide takes each step in the order you'll need it.

How should you list a dissolved law firm on your resume?

List the firm under its real name with your true start and end dates, and add one neutral line about the wind-down, such as "Firm announced orderly wind-down, October 2026." Don't hide it, don't rename it and don't write a paragraph explaining it. Legal hiring is a small world, and anyone reading your CV in late 2026 already knows what happened. A dissolution driven by partner departures and a failed merger says nothing about the quality of your work. Trying to hide it is what makes people wonder. If you're still on the payroll during the 90-day period, write "2021 – Present" until your last day, then change it to the real end month.

The bigger risk is the opposite mistake: over-explaining. Some lawyers write a cover-letter-length defense of the firm's collapse into their CV, or worse, comment on how management handled it. Don't. One factual line under the employer heading is enough. Context belongs in the cover letter or the recruiter call, and even there one sentence will do. If your group moved to another firm and you're following it, that deserves a line too, because it shows partners wanted to keep working with you. And if Crosby or another buyer ends up owning the brand, keep the original name and dates on your CV anyway. Your experience happened at the firm you joined, not at whoever holds the trademark later.

Formatting matters too. Put the firm name, city and your title on one line, and your dates on the right or on the line below, in plain text. Don't put "Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP (dissolved)" in the employer field itself. Some parsers will read the parenthetical as part of the company name, which can cause a mismatch when a background check runs. Keep the ampersand as written, spell the name the same way on your CV and your LinkedIn profile, and don't shorten it to "WGM" alone. If you were seconded to a client while at the firm, list the secondment as a sub-entry under the firm rather than as a separate employer. That keeps your timeline unbroken and stops a reviewer from wondering whether you changed jobs twice.

How do you present deal and matter experience for a lateral associate move?

For a lateral associate resume, lead with a short list of representative matters grouped by practice area. Give the deal type, value range, your own role and the client's sector wherever confidentiality allows. Partners reviewing laterals want one question answered fast: can this person run my next deal or case at their class year? "Assisted on M&A transactions" doesn't answer it. "Drafted disclosure schedules and led a four-person diligence team on a $1.2B take-private for a PE sponsor" does. Only use deal values for matters that were publicly announced. Describe unannounced work by size band and sector instead. Your confidentiality obligations don't disappear because the firm is winding down.

Keep the structure tight. A BigLaw resume for a lateral move usually runs one or two pages, with a separate deal sheet or matter list, and the two documents must agree with each other. On the resume, give each role three to six bullets that show how you progressed: what you did as a junior, what you owned as a midlevel and where you supervised others. Name the practice group, not just "Corporate." Put your bar admissions, class year and law school where they're easy to find, because firms slot laterals by class year and they will check. Pro bono matters belong here too, especially any you first-chaired. For many midlevel associates, that's their only courtroom or lead-counsel experience.

Here's a contrarian take: drop the generic summary paragraph that so many templates push. For laterals moving between peer firms, a three-line profile full of adjectives like "detail-oriented" wastes the most valuable space on the page. Use that space for a two-line practice statement instead, such as "Sixth-year leveraged finance associate; lead associate on sponsor-side acquisition financings and refinancings." It's specific, it uses the words recruiters search for, and it tells a partner within five seconds where you'd fit on their team. For a faster first draft, the HRLens CV builder lets you paste your old CV or describe your matters in a chat, refine the result and export a clean, ATS-friendly version as a PDF or Word file.

How is an in-house counsel resume different from a BigLaw resume?

An in-house counsel resume turns matter work into business results and shows breadth. A BigLaw resume shows depth on specific deals and cases. General counsel hiring for a legal department care less about the size of the deals you documented and more about whether you can advise a product team, manage outside counsel and make a judgment call without a partner signing off. So rewrite your bullets around the client's problem, not the firm's process. "Advised a Fortune 500 consumer company on 15+ commercial agreements, cutting turnaround for business teams" sounds like an in-house lawyer. A list of twelve financing deals, however impressive, can suggest someone who'll try to rebuild a law firm inside the company.

In-house roles also arrive through a different channel. Most corporate legal jobs are posted on company careers pages that feed an applicant tracking system, and many are screened by a recruiter outside the legal team before any lawyer sees them. That recruiter compares your CV with the wording of the job description, so use the same wording. If the posting says "commercial contracts," "privacy," "employment" and "SaaS," those phrases need to show up naturally in your experience, not only in a skills list. Keep the layout simple: one column, standard headings like Experience, Education and Bar Admissions, no text boxes and no contact details in the page header. Firm-branded Word templates full of tables and columns often parse badly, even when the CV behind them is strong.

Be honest about where your experience fits. A restructuring associate from a firm known for bankruptcy work fits naturally at distressed-investing funds, special situations teams and in-house roles at companies coming out of a reorganization. An M&A associate might target corporate development or a legal role at a private equity portfolio company. A litigator often does well in investigations, compliance or employment roles. Don't send the same document everywhere. Pick two or three directions, write one version for each and keep every version to two pages at most. In-house hiring managers are busy, many of them left BigLaw themselves, and they'll notice right away if you haven't thought about what their job actually involves.

Which keywords do legal recruiters and ATS filters look for, and how do you check your CV?

Legal recruiters and ATS filters look for exact practice-area terms, bar admissions, class year and the matter types named in the job description, such as "leveraged finance," "Chapter 11," "private equity," "securities litigation" or "commercial contracts." Broad phrases like "corporate law" or "transactional experience" rarely match a recruiter's search. Where it reads naturally, write terms both ways, for example "mergers and acquisitions (M&A)," because some systems and recruiters search the abbreviation and others the full phrase. Give bar admissions their own section with the jurisdiction and status, and write "admission pending" if that's the truth. Languages also deserve their own line, especially if you did cross-border work out of London or another office.

Before you apply, test the CV against the real posting instead of guessing. Copy the text of the job description, compare it with your experience and look for three kinds of gap: a skill they list that you have but never mention, a practice term you describe in different words and a requirement you genuinely don't meet. Then check whether the file itself parses. Save it as a text-based PDF or Word file, never a scanned image, and confirm that dates, firm names and headings come through in the right order. A CV that looks perfect in your firm's template can still get scrambled once a parser strips out the formatting, and you won't know unless you test it.

This is where an automated check helps. Run your CV through HRLens and you'll get a free overall score out of 100, plus five category scores (experience, tech stack, impact and ownership, clarity and structure, and ATS compatibility) and a visual layout analysis. Paste in the target job's description, as plain text if it's on LinkedIn or Indeed, and the analysis lists the skills you're missing. It also produces ATS-friendly rewrites of your CV in six templates that reuse the posting's keywords. The full fix list, the "why you might be rejected" breakdown and a hiring-probability estimate come with the $3.99 Full Analysis. Run one check on your lateral version and one on your in-house version, and you'll enter the hiring rush with two documents built to pass the first screen.

Frequently asked questions