Starter's orders part 9

CVs and applications can unfortunately be a source of some merriment. You would literally not believe what some of them are like. You would imagine that extreme care would be taken over them. This is the opportunity to get a "foot in the door". If you want to impress, you have to get to interview. You will not get to interview without an impressive CV. Many prospective pupils seem to overlook this basic point.

Being shy is not a quality which is likely to promote a career as a barrister (even though some barristers are quite shy). If you are shy you have to show that you can promote yourself and your cases notwithstanding that. Indicating, as some people have been known to do in their CVs, that they are not particularly good at selling themselves but have lots of talents, is completely hopeless. They might as well right at the top "please put this in the bin now".

In the days when every computer is likely to have a spell check facility, making spelling mistakes in the CV is unlikely to assist the cause.

Someone I know was once conducting two long distance relationships simultaneously which came to an abrupt end when the wrong letters were placed in the wrong envelopes. Many CVs make the equivalent mistake. I quite understand that someone who wants to go to the Bar will be keen to try every opportunity and will be willing to move to where the work is. That is a commendable quality. It is also understandable that in each application they will seek to identify something which is attractive about the particular town or city so as to show why they would be happy there or why they think they could develop a practice there. However if you do that you have to make sure that the version of your CV which is relevant to that place is sent to the chambers in that place. Sending a CV to chambers in Liverpool which states that you've always wanted to live and work in Manchester, or to Manchester saying that London is the centre of a legal world and that's where you wish to practise, is another immediate "go directly to the bin" comment. You would be amazed how frequently this happens.

The problem with modern technology is that you can end up doing embarrassing things that would never otherwise have happened. A solicitor who used to send me e-mails containing jokes, once sent me one which I found difficult to follow. It looked as though it was a sequence of e-mails between a man and a woman trying to arrange a date. Bizarrely there was no punchline. I assumed that this was only part of the joke and that the punchline had been lost. I was completely wrong. The follow-up e-mail 10 minutes later from the same solicitor asked for the previous e-mail to be disregarded, as instead of being sent only to the intended recipient it had been sent to the entire address book in error. (This included it going to at least one judge). Even more embarrassing were the sequence of "round robin" e-mails following from people asking for everyone to be kept informed as to whether the date took place and what happened.

I have never known a CV suffer from the same problem because they would not normally be submitted by e-mail, but technology does play a part. Sometimes people will produce a "spoof" CVs for their partners or friends. This will be the real CV but with various funny additions. (For example if it is being provided to a partner there might be some intimate and personal sexual reference in the hobbies section, if it is to a friend the section which describes hobbies as "archaeology, literature, running and singing" might have been changed to "having sex or drinking as much beer as possible whilst watching football on the telly"). The impact is all to do with the fact that it is usually produced as a serious CV for the partner or friend to comment on, and then of course produces gales of laughter when they get to the relevant bit.

Sadly if you do this you have to make sure that you do not confuse the two versions when you are printing off a CV to send. Most people print repeat documents off without reading them every single time. I have been told by a very reliable source of least one occasion where a reference to sex in a CV was in such graphic terms that the only possible explanation was that this was the "joke" version of the CV which had been inadvertently printed off and sent by mistake. It ruined what was otherwise a CV which read very well. If I told you exactly what it had said you would not believe it, since it is extremely high in the "you couldn't make it up" category.