Communicating Effectively with Foreign Clients and Lawyers

• Author: Barton Legum
• Pages: 17-20

17

If your native lang uage is English, congr atulations—you already s peak the lingua

franca of the 21st ce ntury. There is, however, one problem: Most of the rest of the

world does not speak the same English that you do and cannot understand the

lawyer’s English that you speak ever y day at the office.

This is no sma ll problem. Being able to communicate ef fectively with foreign

lawyers, clients, a nd witnesses is cruc ial to success in an intern ational case. Unless

you are able both to get answers to your questions about the case and to make

your own advice understood, you cannot be effective. Being a litigator—being a

lawyer—is a ll about communication.

The problem here is several fold. First, English is at best a second l anguage for

nonnative speakers. Most have a functional understandi ng of the lang uage but

have not had an opportu nity to develop a speciali zed vocabulary or an ear accu s-

tomed to a wide range of accents a nd usages. Second, most law yers have been

saturated, since law school, in a nationa l legal culture that has developed highly

sophisticated concepts a nd ways to express those concepts rapidly i n a convenient

shorthand. The shorthand ex pressions developed in each system, however, are

mutually i ncomprehensible in any languag e, with few exceptions.

For instance, there is an extraordinar y range of nuance and legal history

behind common procedural words like “summons,” “complaint,” “trial,” and the

like. While any of those words may in fact be the closest Amer ican approxima-

tion of its counterpar t in the foreign legal system, t hat approximation may be far

from close enough for purposes of professional communication. A g reat deal of

meaning may be los t if one blindly accepts such approxi mations.

CHAPTER 2

Communicating Effectively with

Foreign Clients and Lawyers

Barton Legum

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