"Tailor your CV to each application" is the most repeated advice in job hunting and the least explained. Taken at face value it sounds like writing a new CV every time, which nobody has time for — so most people change the personal statement, leave the rest, and send it.
It is worth drawing a distinction before going further, because the whole of this guide rests on it. Tailoring and rewriting are not the same thing, and they are confused constantly. Tailoring changes what is prominent. Rewriting changes what is true. In other words, the facts on a tailored CV are identical in every version you send; what moves is the order they appear in and the words used to describe them.
Once the two are separated, the job becomes much smaller. This guide covers three things: how to read an advert for the order it implies, what to move, and where the line sits.
Read the advert for the order it implies
A legal job advert is usually written by someone listing their problems in the order they feel them. That order is the most useful thing in the document, and almost nobody uses it.
If "experience of e-disclosure platforms" appears in the second line and "strong academic record" appears near the bottom, you have been told what to lead with — and it is not your degree. Before touching the CV, write down the first three requirements in the advert's own words. Those three are what the top third of the page now has to answer.
The other half of this
The cover letter side of the same job: how to adapt your cover letter to the job descriptionWhat to move
- The order of bullets within a role. If the advert leads on document review, the disclosure bullet in your current job goes first, not third. This is the highest-value change available to you and it takes about a minute.
- The order of sections. A recent graduate applying for a research-heavy role can put education above experience. The same person applying for a high-volume document review contract should not.
- The wording, matched to the advert's vocabulary. If the advert says "bundling", your CV should say bundling, not "preparing court documents". Not to game a filter — because the reader is scanning for their own words, and will not stop to translate yours.
- What gets a full entry and what gets a clause. A role irrelevant to this application still belongs on the CV, so there is no unexplained gap, but it can shrink to a single line.
What must not move
Dates, job titles, employers, grades, and whether you actually did the thing. A CV is a document you will be asked about under conditions that get progressively more serious: first a reference check, then, for a training contract or a CILEX qualification, a character and suitability declaration.
The line is cleaner than people assume, and it is worth stating plainly. Re-ordering true things is tailoring. Re-describing what you did is usually still tailoring. But promoting "assisted with" to "managed" is not a wording change at all — it is a different claim, and it is the one that will be tested.
A worked example
Weaker
Legal Assistant, Hartley & Boyd (2024–present) — Provided general administrative support to a busy team — Assisted with a variety of legal documents — Answered client queries and managed diaries
Stronger
Legal Assistant, Hartley & Boyd (2024–present) — Reviewed and coded around 300 documents a week for disclosure on two commercial disputes, using Relativity — Prepared hearing bundles, including pagination and indexing, to a two-day turnaround — First point of contact for 40+ active client files
Same job, same dates, nothing invented. The first could describe almost any office role; the second answers a disclosure-heavy advert in three lines, and every number in it is something the writer could be asked about. Note also what left: "managed diaries" is not untrue, but for this advert it was occupying space the file-handling number needed.
To put it in one line: the advert tells you the order, the order does the work, and none of the facts have to move for any of it.