Legal Recruiting Editing and Proofreading Services

"Recent college graduate" is named in the regulation. So are "young", "college student" and "age 25 to 35": help wanted notices "may not contain terms and phrases that limit or deter the employment of older individuals", and notices containing terms of that kind violate the Act unless a statutory exception applies.¹ Nobody writes those words with intent. They arrive as ordinary shorthand for a level of seniority, from a hiring partner describing the person they picture, and they survive into the posting because everyone reading the draft understood what was meant. That is the characteristic problem of recruiting documents. They are written quickly, by people describing a mental image, and read by strangers and sometimes by regulators.

Job postings and role descriptions make up most of the recruiting work that reaches us. Candidate submissions and cover notes arrive with them, along with candidate resumes and biographies, employer and practice-group profiles, offer letters, interview guides and evaluation forms, market and compensation reports, and outreach templates.

The same principle runs through the other protected characteristics. It is a violation "for a help-wanted advertisement to indicate a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex unless sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for the particular job."² An editor is not making the legal call, and we do not. What an editor can do is notice the constructions that encode a characteristic without naming it: a phrase describing a life stage rather than a skill, a requirement stated as a personal quality where the file means an experience level, a description of the team's culture that has drifted into a description of the team. Where the drafter means three to six years of experience, three to six years of experience says it exactly and is not a proxy for anything.

Vagueness is the commercial problem, and it is separate. A posting that says a firm seeks a talented attorney for a growing practice with an excellent culture will produce applications, not candidates. What the reader on the other side needs is what the work actually is: which practice, what kind of matters, whose desk the work comes from, what the person will be doing in their first six months, and what the expectations are in terms somebody can measure themselves against. Specificity costs applications and raises fit, which is the trade almost every posting should be making and almost none does.

Candidate submissions run on a shorter clock than anyone drafting them believes. A hiring partner forms a view in the first three lines and reads the rest to confirm it. So the strongest evidence belongs at the top, and evidence means matters, jurisdictions, scale and duration rather than adjectives. Excellent drafting skills is a claim about a person; drafted the credit agreement on a $340 million refinancing is a fact about a matter, and it is more persuasive precisely because it can be checked.

Editing a candidate's own resume has a firm boundary and we hold it. We improve how a document reads. We do not add a claim, upgrade a title, close a gap in the dates, or make a responsibility sound larger than the candidate described it. Where something is ambiguous, it comes back as a question to the candidate rather than as a resolution in their favor. That is not caution for its own sake: an embellishment discovered at reference stage costs the candidate the role and the recruiter the relationship.

Lateral moves generate documents shaped by two rules worth knowing about. A lawyer may not participate in offering or making "a partnership, shareholders, operating, employment, or other similar type of agreement that restricts the right of a lawyer to practice after termination of the relationship, except an agreement concerning benefits upon retirement."³ Restrictive covenant language in this field is therefore not the same animal it is elsewhere, and it is not wording to normalize against a general commercial precedent. Separately, where a lateral hire brings a conflict, the screening route requires written notice to the affected former client, and that notice "shall include a description of the screening procedures employed", a statement of compliance, a statement that review may be available before a tribunal, and an agreement to respond promptly to written inquiries.⁴ That is a document with a required content list, addressed to a reader who is not on your side, and it repays the same care as a filing.

Outreach templates fail differently from other documents. A stilted sentence in a letter is read once. The same sentence in a template is read four thousand times, by people who edit for a living, and every one of them can tell it is a template. Getting the first two lines right is worth more than any other hour spent on recruiting copy.

We do not make the hiring or legal judgments. Whether a candidate is right, what a role should pay, whether a covenant is enforceable, and whether a posting complies are decisions for the firm and its counsel, and they reach us made. We do not add a qualification, adjust a figure, or resolve a discrepancy between two documents by choosing the more favorable version.

Candidate and client information is treated as strictly confidential, including named searches, candidates who are not in the market publicly, and compensation data that is not published.