IA SPECIALISED LEGAL PROGRAMS

In front of a changing legal market place, we don´t need to tell you that that the business of law in Spain is changing.

In a sector filled with competent professionals and growing competition at both a national and international level, English is no longer an optional extra.

Both clients and companies expect their lawyers to have a command of the English language. It is now one of the basic tools that lawyers are expected to have at their disposal. Recent graduates are required to have a good level of English and increasingly management and partners are being called on to use English in their day-to-day operations.

Just as information management and office tools have changed in recent years, so too have the language requirements for legal professionals. No one is expecting cases to be defended in front of the Spanish courts in English but the jurisdictions of international contracts are increasingly outside of national borders meaning that the operational language is English. International and European cross-border litigation deriving the free movement of persons and common markets means that often the language of correspondence in English. Collaboration between European law firms often turn to the lingua franca de facto of the EU; English. Whether this is likely to change in the future or not may well be open to discussion but the fact of the matter is that across Europe and the world, English is the most widely spoken second language in the world of business and trade. Both commercial and private law practice demands a command of English regardless of jurisdiction. Legal professionals who seek to work in a globalising world need to demonstrate their ability to function effectively in this new reality.

Your clients speak English. Do you?

Supported by the IA Legal Language team, your IA Legal Trainer will work with you to expand your vocabulary, fluency and knowledge of your jurisdiction, discuss issues that affect it, explore international and European trends and industry insights.

English language training and support services offer immediate added value to your professional perspectives and prospects and improves your clients’ experience.

Lawyers, as effective communicators, have to convince the client, the judge, the counterpart. Good communicators find and use information well. They transmit and share information and ideas in the words that people understand. Communicative lawyers prove they understand the letter of the law and use spirit to practice law.

A good lawyer is a good communicator. Communicators use more than just the words they learned at their mothers´ knee and they don´t stop learning, ever. Investment in language training programs for legal counsel demonstrates the value seen in strong communication skills, in on-going learning and acknowledges the fact that language, in all its forms, is at the centre of law and legal practice.

Participants who receive English training in the work place say that they feel appreciated and supported by their firm. They have the confidence to work on improving their level and increase the scope of their professional performance.

Investment in training is known to be a key factor in personnel retention and employee satisfaction and morale. Attracting the best professionals means demonstrating investment in their futures´ as well as that of the firm.

Whether you are seeking to expand and grow your firm, or looking to extend and improve your personal career studying, improving your English level opens doors and offers opportunities with both employers and future clients alike.

IA English for Legal Purposes trainers are there for you.

Your experience, your needs, your responsibilities; we prioritise and personalise our training approach and content to the reality of your situation. As much a trainer as a language assistant, your trainer will help you with emails, conference, meetings, calls, reports, sales material, research, and more. They will also help you clarify, refine and improve your grammar, fluency, pronunciation, comprehension and all traditional language based skills.

What defines the difference between IA English for Legal Professionals and other Legal English courses is the trainer. We only work with professional and experience language trainers and the legal team is formed by trainers who excel and have experience in the legal sector. The team counts on linguists, pedagogues, public speaking specialists and legally experienced professionals to provide a specialised and personalised service to each and every participant.

Lawyers who have worked with us have gone on to work in multinational law firms, drafting lawsuits in English. They have gained international clients for their current firms. They have built and maintained client relationships in English native speaking countries. They have travelled to and participated in international conferences on wide-ranging topics. They have helped both legislate and litigate. They have both avoided and defended cross-border claims. They have researched and studied and become familiar with using international resources and evidence in defending their cases in the Spanish jurisdictions. They have hosted and recruited international students and been published in international journals and media. They have improved their English level effectively, efficiently and now use English as another tool in their repertoire of skills.

IA believes that the relationship between the trainer and the participant is key. It is something that must be nurtured throughout the service provision. They work with your talent to improve their skill set.

Participant confidentiality is always respected. A culture of mutual respect and trust is created.

But likewise, we believe the relationship between IA and the client is key. We stay in contact throughout offering feedback and asking for the same. Key account managers are assigned to large contracts and PSR issued regularly for all IA participants.

The legal programs also receive the added and constant support of the program director who can always be contacted by both participant and trainer in terms of content and materials support, roadmap and needs-analysis guidance. In the case of the Partner Plus Program, the program director will co-ordinate the online support, telephone sessions and language support portion of the service provision.

There is no single textbook that will explain your job as you do it today. Neither is there one textbook that can address all your needs with English for Legal Purposes. Instead, we utilise the realia you would want to access in English and build and provide the support frame around these real-life resources to aid your language acquisition and improvement.

Based on the insight of leading academics and practitioners in the field of English for Legal Purpose this approach has its roots in the early days of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research and is proven to be the most efficient and effective approach for adult occupational legal learners. Drawing on insight from legal linguists, forensic linguists, discourse analysts, psychologists and sociologists, this approach is in line with current English language training trends towards communicative competence and task-based learning (TBL). The Partner Plus Program also trends towards Computer-Aided Language Learning Approaches (CALL).

We also encourage the use TILT based learning approaches. Translation from Spanish to English and English to Spanish has received a great deal of criticism in recent years as being old fashioned and backwards looking. While we seek to create an English-language-based training environment in which the working language is English, we believe that we can use Spanish as an essential and useful tool to both learn and save time. Translation in English Language Teaching approaches in English for Legal Purposes is especially useful due to the differentiation between Legal and General Spanish and Legal and General English.