Defining a Legal Portfolio
A legal portfolio is a compilation of materials that provides a comprehensive overview of a lawyer’s skills, capabilities, and relevant experiences. Unlike a resume, which typically offers a brief summary of your professional history, a legal portfolio is often a substantial collection of documents designed to showcase what strengths you bring to your practice and what you can offer a client or a potential employer .
An attorney may choose to create a portfolio for various reasons: The documents included in a legal portfolio are typically tailored to demonstrate your strengths based on the audience for the portfolio. Organizations and potential employers want to see what your experience and past work tell about you. When used in the interview process, your portfolio should reinforce good interview responses by providing concrete examples of your key accomplishments.
The Essentials of a Legal Portfolio
Developing a strong legal portfolio is more than a simple compilation of old cases, research articles, and testimonials. It involves carefully curating the documents that best showcase your most sought-after skills. However, there are a few key components that should be included in any legal portfolio:
Case Studies – A case study is a compelling way to describe the success you’ve achieved for your clients. The format of a case study allows you to explain context and details that showcase your capabilities. A case study doesn’t need to be long and complex. Case studies can also be a short overview about a client and what averted a negative outcome sales practices using the terms advocacy, engagement, and effort.
Legal Writing Samples – For attorneys, writing samples are an important supplement to a resume or CV. Judges, clients, and employers want to see how well your legal writing skills can demonstrate your ability to communicate within your practice area. Excellent legal writing is the factor that most influences a hiring decision and ultimately how much (or little) your services are worth. Conversely, poor legal writing by anyone representing you can cost the case.
Court Filings – It’s often important to show what work you have performed in court. Usually, attorneys are on one of two sides – making a case for a motion or appealing the case from the other side’s motion. Either way, it’s important to have samples of brief writing, filings, arguments and appeals.
Client Testimonials – Your clients are a valuable source of information, and many will be glad to provide a testimonial that will fortify your portfolio’s strength. As with court filings and case studies, it’s vital to get permission from the client before including this type of material in your portfolio. Remember, you’re building a portfolio that you’ll use in its entirety, and you don’t want to be in a position where you’re forced to try to explain a gap in your portfolio when you could have formed a cohesive package with the information that you omitted.
Certifications – Your portfolio is an opportunity to inform clients of continuing education classes, certifications, and professional affiliations that support your qualifications and knowledge base for your area of law. Include descriptions of the programs, dates, and results, if applicable.
How to Create an Outstanding Legal Portfolio
When it comes to creating an impressive legal portfolio, the first step is often the toughest. Knowing where to start or how to put together the pieces is crucial in determining whether a potential client is more interested in your services or not.
In order to get a proper footing, you need to assess your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to your work in the legal field. What is it that you do better than anyone else? What do you excel at? Do you have special skills in certain areas of expertise. You can be offering more than they think and demonstrating you have these skills and knowledge is a great way to stand out among the rest.
After you have compiled this information, you’ll want to decide what goes into the portfolio. Some of the most common items are the resume, awards, results of law cases or other projects, descriptions of your work, work samples, publications, and continuing education activities. If you participated in a professional organization, include that as well.
Trying to throw all this information at a client all at one time can be quite overwhelming. It’s vital that you edit this portfolio with your target audience in mind. Putting the most valuable information first and then shrinking back the less relevant material as the information goes on can make all the difference.
You’ll want to organize all this information in a logical manner, starting with the table of contents and then listing each content section. If you are targeting one specific field, such as family law, then you may want to have extra copies for each person in your family law department to bring along to networking events. You should also keep multiple copies organized and up-to-date at your office so they are ready to go at any moment.
A well-organized portfolio will portray you as a professional and someone who pays attention to even the smallest details. You may even want to showcase supplemental materials like photo albums, pamphlets, or a dedicated page for client referrals. Remember, if it adds to your credibility, include it.
Virtual vs. Physical Legal Portfolios
In today’s tech-driven world, both digital and physical portfolios have advantages and serve their own unique purposes. The selection of the right portfolio depends on a host of factors including use, type of lawyer, client expectations, and marketing efforts. The advantages of physical portfolios are obvious. They’re personable, tangible, concrete representations of your work and dedication. When presented in person, they show the level of commitment you have and the interest you take in your clients. In addition, printed portfolios may contain media that wouldn’t normally exist in a digital portfolio such as of photos of events, awards, or business cards. Digital portfolios are much more versatile and are increasingly the norm for a multitude of reasons. First, they are easy to send to anyone with an e-mail address. In addition, when issues come up that need to be revisited, a digital portfolio can be pulled up and easily reviewed. They also offer the option of being password protected, a feature that makes them secure enough to present to clients. Many people carry their portfolios in the form of applications on iPads or smart phones . Improvements in the underlying technology have made these portfolios convenient, taking the natural progression of a digital portfolio to the next level. The portability of these technologies also allows access to the portfolios and files memorized elsewhere. No matter what format lawyers land on, they also need to consider the following components: Presentation: A portfolio must have a presentation scheme that fits the time and place that it is being presented. It should make your best qualities shine through and engage your audience. Accessibility: Online portfolios are much easier to make accessible to a wider audience than any other types of portfolios. Word of mouth efforts and referral strategies have a wider reach with a digital portfolio than with a physical portfolio. Leveraging Internet Tools and Platforms: Being present on social media is highly recommended for all lawyers. These platforms provide lawyers with a way to spread their ideas and develop their professional presence. An online portfolio is an excellent way to reinforce these efforts.
Pitfalls to Avoid and Strategies to Correct Them
Traversing the legal profession as a lawyer, paralegal, or even in-house counsel calls for the pursuit of legal knowledge and the honing of analytical skills and valuable human relationships. To showcase these attributes, the use of a portfolio is necessary to highlight work accomplishments, showcase experience and provide prospective firms with insight into a person’s employment history, work samples and achievements. However, many lawyers make the mistake of thinking that all they need to do is slap together a few pages and see what comes out. Trouble is, when you look at what is churned out, it screams amateur to prospective legal employers one and all. The most common errors that lawyers make in assembling their portfolios to attract the best firms and employers include: For an effective legal portfolio, mistakes such as the above need to be avoided. Instead, lawyers must makes a strong effort to:
Staying Current with Your Legal Portfolio
It’s not enough to build an impressive legal portfolio; you also have to regularly maintain and update that portfolio and keep making progress, both in terms of skill and in terms of documenting your progress within your portfolio. This section will deal with updates and maintenance of your legal portfolio to ensure it keeps up with your achievements.
As the saying goes, "a lawyer never sleeps." Your legal portfolio needs to reflect that same drive — both in terms of your drive to succeed, and the drive of your portfolio to keep up with you. Since a legal career is so fast paced, it’s almost inevitable you’ll be adding new cases and clients to your portfolio. This isn’t something at which to skimp. Your portfolio should reflect how your practice has evolved over time; if you’ve only added a few cases per year because you don’t have time to update your portfolio , it’ll show when you try to showcase your portfolio to get hired for contract work or to demonstrate your skills to prospective clients.
Maintaining your legal portfolio is as simple as setting aside time each weekend, or as often as you can schedule it, to do a few updates. This could take as little as 10 minutes or as long as a few hours, depending on how much you’ve done that week that can be added. It’s important to dedicate this time, however; if you have the discipline to do it weekly, then you will have a professional portfolio that displays the latest and most relevant information about your work, demonstrating your ongoing commitment to your profession.
Not only is it the ability to do your due diligence with new cases that’s important to potential clients and contract employers, but also the willingness to do it. Showing that you have a regular maintenance and updating practice for the legal portfolios you keep can show your tenacity and determination as a lawyer. These are important qualities that can set you above other contract lawyers.