A Conversation with Laura Cloney | Interview by Gina Taranto, PhD
[EDRM Editor’s Note: The opinions and positions are those of the author.]
Previously Published in This Series
In Part I of this series I observed that Legalweek 2026 marked a transitional moment for eDiscovery – something of a fond farewell to the “eDiscovery of yore” as the world moves into the age of AI and we shift to something that isn’t yet fully defined.
In Part II, I shared the first part of a conversation with Laura Cloney, founder of LC Talent Labs, in which she helped place my interpretation of the change in eDiscovery and legal tech in the broader, changing world of work and provided her expert insight about what this practically means for eDiscovery professionals.
In Part III of this series we continue our conversation, and Laura shares practical tips for managing careers in a market that is being dramatically impacted by AI – regardless of whether, how, or how consistently AI is being incorporated into the fabric of work and business.
05 | Is the Resume Dead?
GT: Alright –you’ve given us a picture of the current market, and talked about the unfinished rewrite that’s underway, and how it’s creating churn in the market at a time when job descriptions and the labels for jobs haven’t caught up.
So what does this mean for the resume? When we were prepping and discussing whether it was over-dramatic to claim that “eDiscovery” is dead you said that in its own way, the resume is dead, too. Were you serious?
LC: One hundred percent serious, in the same way that we’re serious about using death as a metaphor for transformation. Resumes aren’t dead and disappearing, but as AI saturates both sides of the hiring process, they’re becoming just one increasingly blunt signal among many. So to stand out, something needs to evolve. I think the resume eventually becomes one of a few career assets that drive the recruiting/career management process.
Resumes aren’t dead and disappearing, but as AI saturates both sides of the hiring process, they’re becoming just one increasingly blunt signal among many.
Laura Cloney, Founder, LC Talent Labs.
GT: Interesting, can you tell us more about how you are thinking about the resume, and what these other “career assets are?”
LC: The resume is a two-page chronological record of where you’ve been and how long you stayed. Right now, a lot of people have figured out how to use ChatGPT or Claude to optimize their resumes to align with job postings in order to compete for roles in this candidate saturated market. The problem is that resumes tend to all look alike. What’s more, once experience gets converted to bullet points on a resume, what’s left often doesn’t show how you made your impact. We’re living in a time in which the tools you applied to solve problems yesterday aren’t the same tools you’ll apply to solve problems tomorrow. So what is most important is being able to showcase how you think, how you organize to achieve good outcomes, including kinds of hurdles you know how to overcome, and the way you are able to exercise human judgment to succeed.
Another problem with the resume, if we’re being honest, is that it’s practically engineered to screen people out. This is a problem for candidates and for hiring managers. Graduation years suggest age. Employment gaps invite assumptions. School & company names carry bias. None of that is relevant to whether someone can do the work, especially when we have so much knowledge and training at our fingertips. In a saturated market, a first-pass recruiter may spend six seconds – literally six seconds – to quickly scan and see if they can see alignment to an open role. “AI-powered” applicant tracking systems can score and rank a resume, but that process is primarily designed to manage volume not deeply evaluate fit.
As an alternative, or maybe a complement to a resume, I like to think about a portfolio – something to show your skills, how you operate, and how you solve problems as part of a bigger picture. This invites real conversation. And real conversation is what moves the needle. A portfolio shows more about how an organization can use your skills than a resume says. I think of a resume, portfolio, and someone’s point of view as three different, but related career assets. And these career assets can be used differently depending on your career stage and your approach.
06 | Managing Your Career / Career Assets for a New Era
GT: I love this idea of career assets. But back to your comment about the process lagging behind new technology, online applications systems still ask you to upload a resume. Practically speaking, how does a candidate get their career assets into the process. Is this a link on the resume to an intentionally designed LinkedIn profile? And especially in a field where work is protected, how do people show their work when they can’t show their work?
LC: There are a couple of pieces to this – let’s start with showcasing the portfolio and the point of view first, and then we can move on to networking, the alternative to a cold resume send.
In terms of your portfolio and point of view, you can pick your medium. LinkedIn is a great way to hone your voice. It’s the largest professional platform, and a huge audience lives there. That’s undeniable. There are levels to it though. First is ensuring your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and reflects your skills and credentials. Next level is utilizing the featured sections to show samples of work. This is a quick way to show proof. The next level on LinkedIn is understanding the algorithm and being strategic about likes, comments, and re-posts. Beyond that is linking to things like a personal website, or a blog. Depending on what you want to showcase, you can host one-pagers on sites like Behance or Dribble, examples of documents in Notion or Google Drive, and you can showcase scripts, dashboards, or experiments on GitHub. All of these supplement the constraints of a two-page resume.
And remember you don’t need to show actual work product, confidential data, or specific detail from specific matters to show your thinking. Summarize to address questions like: What was the problem? What was the approach? What did you measure, and why? What would you do differently? None of that requires disclosing client or company information.
I encourage candidates to think about career assets as a set of materials that together tell the story of their expertise. Consider a one-page professional narrative, two or three problem-focused case studies, and maybe a piece of writing that demonstrates how you think. That’s a richer picture than any resume, and it’s a snapshot of the body of work that is your personal brand.
07 | Your Personal Brand
GT: Okay, you said it – personal brand. What do you mean by that?
LC: I get the discomfort – “brand” can sound corporate and performative and a little exhausting. You can think about it as what an individual’s “professional reputation” has grown into in the age of social media. But here’s the truth: you have a reputation whether you are building it intentionally or not. The question is whether you are an active participant in shaping it and are using it as a tool to open doors and find opportunity. And in a market this competitive, leaving it to chance is a real risk.
GT: This makes sense. But what do you say to people who think of themselves as introverts, or who’d rather make an impact in a more behind-the-scenes way?
LC: What I mean practically is: get clear. First, get clear on the problems you solve, the value you bring, and who needs it. Then decide where your audience lives, and how you reflect your participation there. It doesn’t always mean promoting yourself all over LinkedIn. Maybe it means you’re active in the comments, or you’re deep in the research and building new tools that you share via a link. eDiscovery is a community that is very active on LinkedIn. Write about what you’re seeing. Comment thoughtfully. You don’t have to post every day. You need a point of view, and you need to express it with some regularity. The goal isn’t volume. It’s visibility and specificity. Done consistently, it compounds and generates something really valuable: people start coming to you, rather than you chasing every open role. And this is true whether or not you are actively seeking your next opportunity.
The larger point I am making here is about owning your career. If you’re not actively job seeking, it’s important to know that your personal brand is being defined whether you are actively managing it or not, and if you are actively seeking, it’s important to know that an application and a resume doesn’t fit what’s needed in the market today. Someone who comes with resume, plus a portfolio that is creatively built showing examples of work, showing their proof of solving what an organization is trying to solve for, and has a solid POV is going to be able to drive conversations in a much different way.
The real opportunity in the time of a massive workplace rewrite, is that a candidate who shows up with these assets can have real influence over how new roles get created.
Laura Cloney, Founder, LC Talent Labs.
The real opportunity in the time of a massive workplace rewrite, is that a candidate who shows up with these assets can have real influence over how new roles get created. The conversation is different, and the juicy brainstorming of how you can work together wraps around those skills you’ve been honing for years.
We will conclude our conversation with Laura next week, when we discuss the increasing importance of human relationships and connections in a changing world, and how these are key to using your modern career assets effectively.
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