Correcting a Resume After Sending it to a Law Firm

Dear Lawcrossing,

I did something really stupid, and I need your help. I was a visiting student at a law school that didn't have a traditional grading system. This posed a real problem in trying to convey to law firms exactly how I had done. So I asked the registrar of the school I visited for advice, and she gave me a formula for converting my performance to a traditional 4-point grading system. The formula was complicated, but I finally figured out that I had a 3.7 average, and I put that on my resume and sent it out to law firms. However, after I mailed out my resume, I went back to check my work and realized that I had mis-

calculated my grades, and that I really only had a 3.46 average. I'm horrified and I have no idea what to do.

LJ, Ohio

DEAR LJ,

You know, LJ, LawCrossing is not proud to admit her first reaction to your letter, which was, "Ha! Like I'm gonna make a LawCrossing column out of this one!" For one thing, how often is something like this going to happen to anyone among the minions who read the Goddess?

But then the Goddess mused, and realized that there's a much bigger issue here, one that everybody can identify with. Namely: What do you do when you've sent out correspondence with a big, bad boner in it? People send out accuracy-challenged correspondence all the time. In fact, the Goddess recounts many like stories in her bestseller, Guerrilla Tactics for Getting the Legal fob of Your Dreams. There was the one about the young woman who sent out a 300-piece mass mailer, only to find thereafter that on the "objective" line at the top of her resume, she had intended to state, "Seeking a position in public interest." Unfortunately, her spell-checker had overlooked the fact that she dropped the "L" from "public interest." (Think about it for a minute.) And there's another story about a student who sent out a mailer where the letter suggested that he was a first year, but his resume showed him to be a third-year student. What he did was to send out a letter to all of the same people who'd gotten the mailer, stating, "On further review, I find that I am a third-year student."

Stopped cringing yet? OK, LJ, here's what LawCrossing's pool of experts had to say about your problem. For a start, it's important to recognize the implication here. If you screwed up your math with this formula, what about your accuracy in other matters, like, oh, say, calculating your client's damages? Attention to detail is a crucial skill for lawyers, and that's really what's at stake-not whether your GPA is in actuality a bit lower than your resume states.

But take heart, LJ, because no expert the Goddess con-tacted felt your problem was insurmountable. Here's what to do. First of all, you need to come clean at some point, because the truly important fact here is that you didn't mean to deceive anyone; you made an honest computation mistake, which is far less serious than any conscious deception. It's just a matter of figuring out when, and how, to make a clean breast of things. the Director of Career Services at a major law school suggests that you start by contacting the registrar of the school you visited to find out if other people have made similar mistakes. If the formula is so complicated that many people screw it up, your own boo-boo diminishes in gravity.

Then, you have a choice. One thing you can do is to contact everyone you sent your resume to (you don't state in your letter how many people we're talking about here) and notify them that you accidentally misstated your GPA, state the formula so they can see for themselves how complicated it is and that you've never made a mistake like this (assuming this is true), and explain your obvious mortification. And, as the Director suggests, "It wouldn't hurt to make a self-deprecating joke about it. After all, you've got one fact on your side: a lot of people go to law school in the first place because they hate math." The Director of Career Services at one law school advocates the idea of contacting everyone who got your resume to notify them of the mistake, because "You never know where you resume will wind up; you don't know who the people you sent it to might pass it along to."

The Director says another possibility is to wait and see who's interested in interviewing you, and when they contact you, bring up the mistake and ascertain if they're still interested in interviewing you. As Neal Fillmore, assistant career services director at Franklin Pierce, points out, "After all, we're not talking about a big mistake here. A 3.46 instead of a 3.7 is not that big a deal." So, LJ, you've got your marching orders. Come clean, stress that you're not the kind of person who typically makes this kind of mistake, and say something lighthearted about it to cut the tension. Will everybody let you off the hook? Maybe not, but at least some of them undoubtedly will.

LawCrossing isn't one to lecture, LJ, but your problem also highlights something else-and that is the importance of finding your dream job by getting to know people instead of sending them letters. If you had, say, met these same potential employers by volunteering on a local bar association committee with them, and then shown them your resume only after they'd stated an interest in hiring you, a mistake like this would hardly show up on the radar screen, because they'd already know-and like-you, as a complete package. LawCrossing encourages you to get out there and let people get to know you, LJ, instead of letting yourself be judged by a crummy piece of paper!

See 6 Things Attorneys and Law Students Need to Remove from Their Resumes ASAP If They Want to Get Jobs with the Most Prestigious Law Firms for more information.