Precisely my point. But people think that if they use purple paper, they’ll stand out. They will, but not in a good way.
Wherever you were instructed to mail them to in the advertisement. Again, follow directions!
Law firms, especially larger ones, tend to list on their websites all the attorneys working there, together with their specialized field. This makes it easy to pinpoint an actual human being to whom to address your letter. Some even list their human resources coordinator, which would make it even easier.
Compare a tech or a biotech firm - there’s no way to know who the hell works there without some insider info.
Even if you’ve been instructed to send a paper résumé, I wouldn’t get too fancy on the paper. The paper shouldn’t have any pattern or marbling that interferes with either scanning or photocopying. I’ve been on our hiring committee for bright young law students just out of law school, and we sometimes got a résumé sent to us by the intake staff that were illegible, once they’d been scanned or photocopied, because the pattern/marbling interfered with the scanning process. The originals looked nice, but we never got the originals.
If you’re sending it to a judge, keep in mind that judges spend their careers reading stuff, often on a tight deadline. The more you can do it to make it easier to read, the better - short and concise; lots of white space to make it easy on the eye; well-organized.
Also, the judge will likely not be the first person getting the résumé. Given the number of applicants a clerkship or summer job will attract, the judge will assign them to someone else to weed, often a current clerk. You want to write a résumé that that clerk will remember so that when the clerk is briefing the judge on the résumés the clerk has selected, the clerk will be able to respond quickly and concisely to the judge’s question: “Why should I consider this candidate?”
Remember as well that if you’re clerking for a judge, the main thing you’re going to be doing is writing research memos for that judge. So one of the main things the judge is going to be thinking, other than your basic qualfications, is: “Does this applicant have good writing skills? Do I want to spend the next four months reading memos from this person?”
On a thing called a typewriter.
Seriously.
For a long paper, I would handwrite it and give it to a typing service to type for me. I didn’t have access to a computer until I was in grad school, and it was in a computer lab operated by the law school, where we all had to take our turns with the computers, storing our work product on 5" floppies.
(“Tell us about the invention of the internet, Grandad…”)
Now msmith537’s comments make more sense. I was starting to think he forgot how people received resumes in circa 1980.