How to Write a Solicitor CV That Actually Gets Read

What a hiring solicitor or recruiter scans for first

Before anyone reads a word of your experience, they are looking for four things: your PQE, your current firm and practice area, whether you're qualified in the right jurisdiction, and whether your SRA record is clean. This happens in the first ten seconds, often before the personal statement is read at all. If any of those four is missing or buried on page two, the CV goes in the maybe pile or gets skipped, because the reader has no fast way to check fit.

PQE — post-qualification experience — is the single most load-bearing figure on a solicitor's CV. A firm advertising for a 4-6 PQE corporate associate is not interested in your total years in legal work; they want to know how many years have passed since you were admitted to the roll, because that number correlates (imperfectly, but consistently in how the market talks about seniority) with what you can be trusted to run unsupervised. State it explicitly near the top: "Qualified solicitor, England & Wales, admitted 2019 (6 PQE)." Don't make the reader calculate it from your training contract dates.

Practice area needs to be named precisely, not gestured at. "Commercial litigation" and "insurance litigation" are different searches and different desks. "Corporate" covers everything from private M&A to equity capital markets, and a hiring partner in one will not assume you can do the other. If you've moved between areas, say so and say when, rather than letting your matter list imply a specialism you don't have.

The credentials that have to be exact

Get these right, in this order, near the top of the CV:

• Qualification and jurisdiction. "Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales" is not the same as being admitted in Scotland (where the title is solicitor under the Law Society of Scotland) or Northern Ireland, or as holding a foreign qualification with no England and Wales admission. If you qualified via the SQE (Solicitors Qualifying Examination, the route that has been replacing the LPC and training contract system since 2021) rather than a traditional training contract, that's fine to state plainly — it is not a lesser route and hiding it looks evasive rather than diplomatic.
• Date of admission, not just year of qualification exam pass, since PQE is counted from admission to the roll.
• SRA registration, and confirm there's nothing to disclose. If you've had any regulatory issue, get advice on how to handle disclosure before you get to interview stage — do not let a recruiter discover it via a Solicitors Regulation Authority check after an offer has been made.
• Rights of audience, if relevant to the role — solicitor-advocates with higher rights of audience in the Crown Court or higher courts should state this explicitly, since it's a distinct qualification from general admission and matters enormously for advocacy-heavy roles.
• Panel memberships, where you hold them: approved panel status with a bank, insurer, or government legal panel (e.g. Crown Commercial Service legal panels) is a credential in its own right and is often what a firm is actually recruiting for when the role description mentions "panel work."
• Language skills, if you work cross-border — for City firms doing international M&A or for firms with EU, Middle Eastern or Asian client bases, working fluency in a relevant language is frequently the deciding factor between two similar candidates and is routinely left off.

Evidencing your practice: matters, not job titles

A solicitor's CV is not judged on job titles the way many other professions' are — "Associate" at three different firms tells a reader almost nothing. What tells them something is matter experience, described specifically but without breaching confidentiality or privilege.

The convention is to anonymise the client but not the substance: "Advised a FTSE 250 manufacturer on a £120m cross-border acquisition, leading due diligence and drafting the SPA" is standard and tells the reader far more than "Handled M&A transactions." You are not naming the client, but you are naming the deal size, your role in the deal team, and the specific documents or stages you owned. For litigation, that means the nature of the dispute, the court or tribunal, and whether you ran it or supported: "Acted for the defendant in a £2m breach of contract claim in the Commercial Court, running the matter from disclosure to trial." Vague verbs — "assisted with," "involved in" — read as a signal that you didn't actually run anything, even when that's not true, so be specific about what you owned versus what you supported.

Fee-earning targets and billing, where you can state them without breaching a firm's confidentiality policy, are worth including for private practice roles: hitting or exceeding a billable hours target is a concrete, checkable claim that a lot of CVs avoid because it feels like boasting. It isn't boasting; it's evidence.

If your firm or team has a Chambers and Partners or The Legal 500 ranking, and you were named or your team's work contributed to it, say so — but only where genuinely true and only for the relevant practice area band, since a partner reading it will know the difference between "ranked" and "recommended lawyer."

Tools and systems worth naming — and the ones that aren't

Most solicitor CVs either omit systems entirely or list generic "Microsoft Office" filler that adds nothing. What's actually worth naming: document management systems like iManage or NetDocuments, practice management and billing systems like Elite or Aderant, e-discovery platforms if you've run disclosure exercises (Relativity is the one most litigation teams will recognise), and legal research tools — Westlaw, LexisNexis, Practical Law — where fluency genuinely varies and matters for research-heavy roles. If you've used a specific contract lifecycle management or AI-assisted drafting tool that's relevant to the advertised role, name it; firms increasingly ask about this directly, and a specific answer beats a vague one about being "tech-comfortable."

What doesn't belong: listing "strong communication skills" or "attention to detail" as if they were credentials. Every solicitor's CV claims these. None of them are checkable. If you want to demonstrate attention to detail, let the matter descriptions do it — a CV with no typos, correctly used legal terminology, and precise dates already proves the point without a bullet point saying so.

What solicitors routinely leave off

The most common gaps, in order of how often they cost an interview:

PQE stated as a range or omitted entirely. "Several years' experience" instead of a number invites the reader to assume the worst case.

Secondments. Client secondments — particularly in-house secondments to a bank, insurer or corporate client — are some of the strongest evidence of commercial competence a solicitor can offer, because they show you've worked inside the client's business rather than just advising it from outside. They get left off because candidates think of them as a break from "real" fee-earning work, when in practice they're often the most differentiating line on the page.

CPD and further qualifications. Continuing Professional Development hours themselves rarely need listing, but a completed further qualification — a Diploma in Financial Crime Compliance, an IP-specific qualification, a Notary Public qualification — belongs near the credentials section, not buried in "other."

The reason for leaving, when it was structural. Redundancies, department closures and firm mergers happen constantly in law and are not the candidate's fault, but an unexplained gap or a string of short stints reads as risk unless you say, briefly, why.

Regulatory and disclosure history, addressed above — better handled proactively than discovered later.

What to do next

Pull up your most recent three matters and rewrite each one as: what the matter was, what you specifically did, and what the outcome or scale was — without naming the client. Put your admission date, jurisdiction and PQE in the first third of the page, not the last. Check that your practice area language matches the exact terms used in the advert you're applying to, since a hiring partner searching a CV database or scanning quickly is looking for those words, not synonyms for them. If you're applying to more than a handful of roles across different practice areas, that rewriting has to happen for each one, because the version that works for a commercial litigation role won't work for a corporate one. jobmarket.pro does that matching and rewriting from one profile, matter by matter, against each advert, without inventing experience you don't have.