How much detail should a paralegal give about work covered by an NDA?

The work an NDA leaves on your résumé

Start from what's plainly yours: the practice areas you supported, the filing systems you worked in, and the kinds of documents that went out under an attorney's signature. Treat identity as the layer to protect and technique as the layer to show, then confirm that split against your own copy of the agreement.

In a paralegal seat the caption is what you withhold and the technique is what you sell, so the verbs stay: drafted, cite-checked, produced, calendared. The caption goes; the craft stays.

A document review protocol you built (coding rules, privilege screens, escalation paths) describes real work with every client name already absent. A filing you prepared carries its detail in the motion type and the court level, and the caption doesn't have to appear.

Credentials sit outside the matter entirely, so a certificate such as the NALA CP goes on in full. So does the e-discovery platform you know, named as a system rather than a matter.

Turning covered work into a résumé line

The rewrite runs in one direction: work first, identity never. List every matter you have touched, then pick the practice areas you want the next firm to see. Draft each bullet from the work type, the systems you used, and the deliverable, leaving out caption, client, and deal facts.

A line that works reads like this: "Managed first-pass document review for a multi-district products case, wrote the coding manual, and trained the contract reviewers who applied it." Every noun in it is yours: the protocol, the manual, the training. Nothing in it identifies a party.

Give your LinkedIn profile one notch less than the résumé version, since a bullet you hand a recruiter privately isn't one you've published to everyone the matter involved.

At a Fortune 500 company

At a very large public company, your employer's name is already on the résumé, so the question narrows to matter detail rather than to hiding where you work. In the US, asking the legal team that drafted the NDA where the line sits is a routine request, and a company that size usually has someone on point for it.

Scale also gives you cover: with matters running through many teams, a bullet framed by practice area doesn't point at anyone in particular. Name the practice group's kind of work and let the org chart stay blurry.

If you are mid-level

A few years in, you have enough matters to be selective, and selection is the real answer to the detail question. Show the practice mix a supervising attorney screens for first, litigation or transactional, and spend your specifics on the matters whose work you can describe most concretely.

A supervising attorney sorts litigation experience from transactional experience before weighing anything else on the page, so don't let a confidentiality worry blur that signal. Pick fewer, say more. Two vague matters described honestly beat six detailed ones you'd have to talk around in an interview.

Checking each résumé line against your own NDA

Check every drafted line against your own copy of the agreement, and hand anything borderline to the supervising attorney on that matter. The document you signed is the boundary; a colleague's memory of it isn't. Other judgment calls like this one are collected under [résumé questions, answered](/answers/resumes).

Run tonight's test on your hardest matter: rewrite its bullet with no caption and no client, then read it to someone who doesn't work at the firm. If they can tell what you did but not who it was for, the line is ready.

How much detail should a mid-level paralegal give about work covered by an NDA at an early-stage startup?

An early-stage startup usually has few matters and few clients, so a bullet that names the deal type and the quarter can identify the client on its own. Describe the category of work and the systems you ran rather than any single matter, and take close calls to whoever handed you the agreement, often outside counsel rather than an in-house team.