Hi!
If you're feeling overwhelmed by how much experience you've got to fit into a VS application, you are absolutely not alone. This is one of the most common questions to be faced with, and I think having “too much” to include is a good problem; the real skill is in curation and framing, not in cutting things out of fear.
The short answer to your first question is no, having a lot of experience doesn't inherently hurt your application, and no experience is really ‘too small’ to mention. What matters far more is how you word it and what you draw out of it, rather than how many lines it takes up.
That said, some experiences will carry more weight than others simply because the skills involved map more directly onto what firms expect from a trainee. Your three legal internships fall into that category, and I'd include all of them. The key is making each one feel distinct rather than repetitive, so pull out a different skill, project, or piece of work from each so a recruiter reading all three comes away with a sense of range, not the same story told three times.
Your part-time job is also valuable, and this doesn’t depend on it being law-related. Critical soft-skills (e.g. client-facing work, prioritising competing tasks, working under pressure) are things lawyers undertake daily, and a non-legal role often demonstrates them just as convincingly as an internship does. The same logic applies to your university exec positions and your cohort rep role: these are strong evidence of ownership and initiative, which recruiters are consistently looking for. Again, try to vary the skills you highlight across these rather than letting them blur into one experience.
For the firm-facing interactions (open days, dinners, virtual internships), I would tend to club these together, especially if the firm has limitations on number of experiences, unless you were competitively selected for one of them (via an application or interview process). If you were, that’s worth mentioning separately (e.g. ‘I was competitively selected…). Otherwise, grouping them keeps your section tighter.
Ultimately, the goal of your work experience section isn't only to prove you've done a lot but also to show variety in the skillset that makes a good trainee solicitor. The best way to do that is to lead with the experience itself and follow with the skill it gave you, rather than leading with the skill in the abstract.
A few practical points on format:
- Try not to go beyond 10 experiences total. Most firms also have word or character limits, so concision matters as much as content.
- Stick to paragraphs rather than bullet points, unless a firm’s application/team from graduate recruitment explicitly says it accepts or prefers one over the other.
- In my experience, if you're applying to US firms, they tend to respond better to you speaking directly about the experience itself. English and Magic Circle firms, by contrast, tend to enjoy a more even balance between describing the experience and unpacking the skill or insight behind it.
One tip that’s helped me personally: try to tie the skill you gained back to something specific the firm does. For example, rather than just saying an internship developed your interest in ESG, you might say something like:
this experience deepened my understanding of ESG and my interest in [specific area], which I'd welcome the chance to apply in supporting the firm's pro bono initiatives in sustainability. That kind of specificity signals genuine interest rather than a generic skills list, and it tends to land well with reviewers.
Hope this helps give you a clearer sense of how to structure things. Please feel free to follow up if you want a second pair of eyes on how you've framed any particular section.
