Gabriela Rendon Staff Attorney at Gender Equality Law Center
How did a multilingual professional dancer find her calling in public interest law?
Gabriela Rendon, Esq. first came to the U.S. to pursue her career as a professional dancer with Martha Graham School in New York City. Fluent in English, Spanish and French, she studied law in Argentina and France. Eventually she found her calling in public interest law at Gender Equality Law Center.
How did she turn her post-graduate fellowship into a permanent position?
How did she find a career that enables her to do impactful and meaningful work?
Why is it important for lawyers to keep a creative outlet?
How did Sofia Vergara inspire her to embrace who she is as an international lawyer?
Eve Perez Torres moved to the U.S. from Colombia and started law school at the age of 34. She studied part time while raising a child. Today she is the Senior Attorney at FedEx working on legal and regulatory matters with counsels from around the world.
How did she land your first law job in the U.S.?
How did Sofia Vergara inspire her to embrace who she is as a lawyer?
What is it like to work in the in-house legal department for a multinational corporation?
Before Xin made partner at Baker McKenzie, he could not find many role models who have the exact same background as his. He moved to the U.S. from China in his early twenties to pursue a graduate degree in biochemistry. He was increasingly disillusioned about the scientific research he was doing. One day, he was studying in the library with a friend, who was studying for the LSAT. It all started with a joke about whether Xin would be able to beat his friend on the test. Xin ended up going to law school and the rest is history.
By now you have probably read the Paul Hasting’s presentation on the non-negotiable expectations for junior associates, what does a BigLaw partner think of that? How did Xin find his first job in the U.S. leveraging the alum network at Georgetown Law? How did he survive and thrive at BigLaw? What are the challenges he faced as a non-native English speaker and how did he overcome it? How does he develop meaningful relationships with colleagues and clients?
Yara Karam and Amal Clooney have at least two things in common. They are both Lebanese. They are both international lawyers with a LL.M. degree. Yara is fluent in Arabic, French and English. How did a Rice Krispie recipe on LinkedIn lead to her externship at Hogan Lovells, where she was tasked to do cool things such as going to congressional hearings and joining a call with the Secretary of State of the United State? How did she leverage her language skills and work experience through existing connections on LinkedIn? What’s her advice on how to become a valuable addition at your first job?
Yi Song, the Executive Director for Graduate and International Programs and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law, is the founder of the Master of Laws Interviews Project. The project provides curated insights to help internationally trained lawyers to establish and develop their U.S. legal careers.
Yi Song, the Executive Director for Graduate and International Programs and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law, is the founder of the Master of Laws Interviews Project. The project provides curated insights to help internationally trained lawyers to establish and develop their U.S. legal careers.
Yi Song, the Executive Director for Graduate and International Programs and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law, has launched the Master of Laws Interviews Project. The project provides curated insights to help internationally trained lawyers to establish and develop their U.S. legal careers.
Professor Song first came to the U.S. in 2007 as an exchange student at Georgetown University. She received her first law degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University in China and her Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from Georgetown Law. While studying for the New York Bar Exam and looking for jobs in the U.S., she found little information on how multilingual and internationally trained lawyers can build a career in the U.S.
Prof. Yi Song, Executive Director of Graduate & International Programs at Georgetown Law
Recently on the Legal Writing Institute listserv, a request was made for examples of ways to help teach cross-cultural competency. And I shared with the requester the following two activities from when I worked at St. John’s Law which I think were very effective for both teaching cross-cultural competency and also for fostering interaction between JD and LLM students. I think they also helped shift perspectives away from a deficit mindset of LLM students and toward a view that recognizes and takes advantage of the asset that LLM students are to a US law school.
Activity #1: Legal Writing Role Play
This activity involved collaboration between an LLM legal writing section and a JD writing section. It was the result of brainstorming with the JD legal writing professor and coming up with a plan based on the legal writing assignment the JD students would already be doing. The role play would explain to both the JD and LLM students that they were associates in a global law firm but in offices in different countries. And they had no previous relationship or interaction.
Here is the latest podcast episode of the Multilingual Lawyer series for the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast, in which I interviewed Georgetown Law legal writing professors Eun Hee Han and Jonah Perlin.
This is a fascinating discussion among three professors at Georgetown University Law Centre. Jonah and Eun Hee are Legal Practice professors, meaning they teach legal writing, but they also both have significant experience working with international students in Georgetown’s JD program.
Prof. Jonah Perlin
Whether you are a student or instructor you will find this to be an inspiring interview. Jonah and Eun Hee have fascinating backgrounds and their dedication to their students and love for teaching make this an enlightening chat.
Among other things, Eun Hee has previously been co-chair of the Legal Research & Writing Diversity Committee for the Association of American Law Schools. She is currently on the Editorial Board for the Asian Journal of Legal Education and a member of the Asian Pacific American Legal Writing Professors Collective.
Jonah is also a graduate of Georgetown Law and did his undergraduate degree at Princeton University where he majored in religious studies. He has worked as a litigator at the law firm of Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington DC and also clerked for federal appeals court Judge Robert A. Katzman of the 2nd Circuit and for Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the US District Court for Washington, DC.
And Jonah is the founder of the very successful and influential HowILawyer Podcast in which he interviews different lawyers about how they practice law.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview my colleague Paula Klammer for the Multilingual Lawyer interview series for the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast, a podcast aimed at helping foreign-educated lawyers and law students improve their legal English.
Here’s a summary of the episode from USLawEssentials:
The USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast continues its series of interviews with multilingual lawyers as Stephen Horowitz interviews Professor Paula Klammer.
Paula is a legal English Lecturer & Research Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Legal English. Currently earning her Ph.D. in Law from Universidad de Palermo in Argentina, Paula is an experienced lawyer and translator and is bilingual in Spanish and English. She speaks a few other languages, too, including French and Brazilian Portuguese (but she’s modest and says she’s not proficient yet).
This is a really cool interview with a fascinating guest. Paula’s bilingual background and her work as a translator enable her to provide insights on the special challenges of translating legal English, especially when dealing with false cognates, different writing styles, and very different legal systems.
Link to the episode is in the comments.
And hey – – do you think Spanish people speak faster or slower than most English speakers? Not sure? Got a hunch? You’ll find out.
Paula also discusses her doctoral dissertation so you’re going to learn a lot from this podcast.
Enjoy and let us know what you liked most about this episode.
We haven’t posted much on here over the last few months, and that’s in a large part because we’ve all had busy summers. Below are updates on what some of the Georgetown Legal English faculty has been up to over the summer:
Professor Hoffman is back at Georgetown Law this fall after being on sabbatical in the spring. While on sabbatical, he traveled to Iceland, Argentina, Uruguay, France, England, and Scotland. In October, Professor Hoffman will accompany Dean Treanor on a trip to the Gulf. The law school will be hosting alumni receptions in Riyadh and Dubai. In addition to teaching his classes in the Legal English Program, Professor Hoffman will teach a seminar in the spring called Language and Law in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University.
Professor Weger and Professor Lake spent the summer revising their innovative language-focused curriculum for Fundamentals of Legal Writing for the 2022-2023 academic year. In the fall semester, the students will learn about the lawyer-to-lawyer genre and gain language-based strategies to write a high-quality memo. In the spring semester, the students will learn about the scholarly writing genre and how to write a high-quality mini-scholarly legal research paper.
This June and July, Professor Dundon was thrilled to return to IE Law School in Madrid, Spain, where he’s been teaching a class on contract drafting for the past three summers. The course is designed to simulate real-life contract-drafting assignments, with a primary focus on contracts governed under U.S. law. After teaching in Spain, Prof. Dundon spent several weeks traveling through Eastern Europe with his son, including a stop in Budapest, where he took some Hungarian lessons.
In August, Prof. Dundon taught a section of U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing as part of the Summer Experience at Georgetown Law, which is a program designed to allow entering LL.M. students get a head-start on their coursework. Work also continued all summer in Prof. Dundon’s Ph.D. program, and he finalized a couple of linguistics articles over the summer for submission to academic journals.
This was Prof. Klammer’s first summer at Georgetown! She spent most of her summer at Williams Library working on her PhD in Law dissertation on the intricate relationship between law and language and what that means for legal education.
But being on campus all summer paid off and she had the unique opportunity to meet Georgetown Law’s Summer Institute students thanks to Professor Michael Cedrone’s kind invitation to sit in on his Foundations of U.S. Law course and to attend the Legal Writing Institute’s Biennial Conference at Georgetown law. (You can read more about Paula’s experience at the conference here.) Following that course, she helped Professor Craig Hoffman teach US Legal Research & Writing (USLRAW) to the summer institute students in preparation to co-teach the course with him during the Fall semester.
Prof. Klammer with her husband at the Washington Nationals game
But it wasn’t all work and no play. She also explored DC with her husband, going to everything from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival at the Mall to the Opera at Wolf Trap, while watching the Nats win a couple of games (and lose many others!) at Nationals Park.
In August, Prof. Dutra taught a section of the U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing to the Summer Institute students. The rest of her summer was busy getting her youngest son ready to go off to college. She is now teaching a section of US Legal Research & Writing to students in the Two-Year LLM Program.
Starting in May, Professor Horowitz set up two Georgetown Law Online Legal English (OLE) courses available to all incoming Georgetown LLM students to help them prepare for the Fall 2022 semester–OLE: Orientation to the US Legal System and OLE: Reading Cases. In May, Professor Horowitz also co-created and co-taught an online legal English writing course to a cohort of female judges from Afghanistan, collaborating with Seton Hall Law School Professor Daniel Edelson who is founder of the USLawEssentials.com online legal English platform. Profs. Horowitz and Edelson also designed an online legal English course on reading US case law to be offered to Ukrainian law students during the fall 2022 semester.
In addition to his teaching, Prof. Horowitz also continued his series of multilingual lawyer interviews for the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast, including interviews with Georgetown’s Tax LLM Director Ellis Duncan, University of Minnesota Law School legal English professor Karen Lundquist, immigration lawyer Nick Harling, and Italian legal English teacher and legal translator Claudia Amato. Professor Horowitz also enjoyed a Great American Roadtrip with his family this summer that took them through a total of 17 different states.
