Your Legal English Questions Answered

How did Legal English UK start?

A group of Legal Language Trainers got tired of working for anonymous language schools run by corporations and billionaires. We could see that there was no accountability and no motivation for the teachers to do well. The language schools were like a McDonalds franchise. You sit down in a big group, an underpaid EFL teacher talk to you for fifty minutes and you leave the classroom having learnt next to nothing.

 

There had to be a better way to teach Legal English, TOLES and Legal Spanish. All of our teachers had legal backgrounds and had been working in EFL and ESOL sectors for several years. It made sense to provide a better service where lawyers and law students could benefit and get considerably more value.

 

Who have you worked with?

Legal English Language Training is proud to have worked with law firms of the calibre of Baker & McKenzie, Jausas Law and Hardwicke Chambers as well as top corporations such as Google, Banco Santander and Cisco Systems and law societies such as ELSA and the Almeria Law Society in Spain. It is an honour that these many great organisations recognise that in an area as complex as legal English, there is much better value to be gained from consulting experts that value you and your organisation rather than a school with millions of students.

 

What is your teaching style?

Whether you are learning legal English, legal Spanish, legal German, legal French or business English, every course is different. We prefer teaching one-to-one as every individual has different learning capabalities and we are trying to be different from every other language school in the world.

 

Lawyers are highly demanding students. In a group of 12 or 15, they are going to get lost in the slipstream. Teachers will forget them or will be concentrating on the weakest students. Our role is to increase your confidence and improve your fluency in order to become the best lawyer in your firm. If you want to be like everyone else, go to McDonald's.

 

How does a lesson work?

No two lessons are ever the same because we usually work with lawyers and law students as individuals. You can expect discussion about language and the law, exercises to build your skills, lots of work on speaking and listening and some work on writing. One important aspect of each lesson is guidance - you will know exactly what you are doing at all times and why you are doing it.

 

Do you work with ELSA?

ELSA stands for the European Law Students' Association and we have a friendly relationship with some members. We are always happy to work with them and look forward to working with them in the future. Needless to say, if ELSA were to approach us and we found a transparent way of working with them, we would be more than happy to do that.

 

Are you accredited by the British Council?

We have consulted widely on this and believe that Legal English Language Training derives no value whatsoever to possessing accreditation by English UK or the British Council. While we have friendly relationships with both organisations and they have asked us to join them on many occasions, they are groups that exist for marketing purposes and have no bearing on quality control of language classes and teachers. We believe that the thousands of pounds it costs to be a member of these organisations are far better spent on training our own teachers to be the very best in the industry. We have also asked that they include a demand that their members pay teachers a decent wage but they have refused to do so.

 

Legal English Language Training runs classes for lawyers in English and several other modern foreign languages. For further information, you can e-mail us or telephone (44)0 20 3573 0182.

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