I had the good fortune to be one of the reviewers for this book, which I think addresses an important need. Barrie recently sent me some sneak-peak photos of the book. And I realized that a blurb I’d written will be on the back cover!
Looking forward to getting a copy when it’s out and hopefully seeing it used in a future negotiation course for our LLM students.
The hiring partner tells you: what is BigLaw looking for when hiring internationally trained lawyers?
When Ruoke graduated from law school, the U.S. economy was in the midst of the subprime crisis. The job market posed unprecedented challenges. Undeterred, she persisted and eventually secured a position in the investment funds practice group.
Now, as a hiring partner at Morgan Lewis, she interviewed and hired many candidates. What lawyering skills and qualifications do BigLaw firms seek when hiring internationally trained lawyers? What advice does her have on effective networking? What was her most important takeaway about legal writing? Why does she believe that listening to English improves writing as a non-native speaker?
Director of International Tax Services at PricewaterhouseCooopers Miami office
How to make it to the top at Big Four?
Guillaume was tired of living Paris when he left his in-house job for a French oil and gas company. He always imagined himself working and practicing law in a language other than French, his native tongue.
Today he lives in Miami and directs the International Tax Services at PwC. What is like to work in a fast-paced multilingual dynamic place like PwC, where the entire floor was staffed with people from around the world? How to get an internship at the Big Four? How to turn your internship into a job offer?
Alina Solodchikova, Tax Controversy Leader and Principal Attorney at RSM
How to make it as an internationally trained tax attorney?
When Alina moved to New York with her newly minted LLM as a Russia-trained lawyer, someone told her that there was little chance that she would make partner because of her exotic last name. Boy, doesn’t she prove the naysayer wrong? After having worked at the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel for nearly six years, today she’s the tax controversy practice leader and the principal attorney at RSM, the fifth largest accounting firm in the U.S.
How did she make it to the top at one of the biggest accounting firms in the U.S.? How did she find her first job through a networking event? What activities and events are the most helpful during her LLM year to develop her career?
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?
I had a great time yesterday moderating the well-attended pre-book launch webinar for a new legal English book published by Routledge titled Practical English Language Skills for Lawyers by co-authors Natasha Costello and Louise Kulbicki, both UK-trained, Europe-based legal English professionals who are active members of EULETA and widely respected in the field.
I also was fortunate to be one of the reviewers for the book and had an opportunity to see how well they incorporate authentic materials and tasks as well as highlight differences in British and American legal English throughout.
Listen to the recording of the webinar below to learn more about the book and get a sneak peak as well as hear the questions from attendees .
Here’s a brief description of the book:
“This book shows non-native, English speaking lawyers how to apply their English language skills to everyday legal situations and contexts, providing essential guidance to ensure they can work confidently in different settings and mediums.
Including activities based on real-life scenarios, the book will allow lawyers and law students to practise their English in key areas of working life, from networking and client meetings, to telephone and conference calls, contract drafting and contract negotiations, presentations and using social media. Written by two highly experienced legal English language tutors, both former legal professionals, it also features online support material that includes listening exercises to complement those based on writing and reading comprehension.”
I had a thought about a week ago that perhaps the best way to check and see if a text written by a student was in fact written by ChatGPT or other AI. And it turns out there is a way to do it, but it’s not the way I thought it might work.
I had already tested ChatGPT by giving it the same final exam fact pattern/question I had given to my LLM students. And ChatGPT was able to provide a pretty decent response.
So next, I took that response and fed it back to ChatGPT asking it if ChatGPT had written this text. But ChatGPT responded by explaining that it has no memory, etc. So I figured that was the end of it.
However, I learned today from a commenter on LinkedIn that, as in law school, it’s really about asking the right questions. And in this case, the right questions is:
“Is this text AI-generated?”
This led to a very definite response that, yes, this text was indeed AI-generated. Problem solved!
Update: I learned after publishing this post that this is not exactly “problem solved.” A colleague at another law school shared that he followed a process similar to mine, but ChatGPT believe that the text was in fact written by a human. So the “tip” is far from foolproof.
But I wasn’t satisfied, so I asked it how it knew. And it very quickly and confidently listed off several factors:
“As an AI language model, I can recognize patterns and characteristics in text that are typical of machine-generated text. In this particular case, the text is characterized by a high level of technical language, a formal tone, and a logical structure that is typical of texts written by AI. In addition, the text does not contain any errors or irregularities that would be expected if it had been written by a human. All of these features suggest that the text was generated by AI.”
Wonderful! But wait a second….Lots of people, including most law students at Georgetown and other law schools, are trained to write with these very same characteristics. So I asked, “Can you be more specific?”
And it essentially listed the same characteristics, but this time in a numbered format which made it appear much more specific and persuasive. Even though it wasn’t.
So then I asked it specifically, “What kinds of differences might distinguish a text written by a highly skilled writer and a text generated by AI?” But it listed qualities that might distinguish a human’s writing from AI, such as style, creativity, context and human touch. As a representative of the human race, I guess I’ll take those as compliments. But it still doesn’t provide any concrete examples as to how it can distinguish between a highly-skilled human writer and an AI app like ChatGPT.
In other words, ChatGPT was essentially borrowing from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who famously said in his decision on obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964))
In November, Professor Hoffman traveled with Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor to visit Georgetown Law LLM alumni in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
During the Spring 2023 semester Prof. Hoffman will teach a law and linguistics course in which students will examine originalism from a linguistic perspective.
Prof. Hoffman with Abdulaziz Altuwarijri (Georgetown 2-Yr LLM), Dean of Prince Sultan University
Professor Song’s essay Lawyering While Chinese will be published in the book Fostering First Gen Success and Inclusion: A Guide for Law School by Carolina Academic Press forthcoming February 2023.
In August Professor Dundon was awarded the IE Prize for Teaching Excellence for his Contract Drafting class that he taught over the summer at IE University Law School (Madrid, Spain)
He has also been invited to present at the:
Legal Writing Institute: Advancing Simulation-Based Pedagogy, hosted by Fordham University Law School; presentation titled Approaching Contract Drafting and Email Writing Through a Simulated Law Firm Experience (New York, NY; December 2022); and for the
Presentation titled “Removing the Training Wheels: Encouraging Student Writers to Take Charge”
Presentation titled “Ditching Traditional Feedback Practices: Assessment through an Asset-Based Lens”
Prof. Weger has also been invited to present at the Washington Area TESOL Fall 2022 Conference; Presentation titled, “Expressing Your Teacher Voice: A Framework for Exploring Professional-Identity Development”
Building on their presentations, Prof. Lake is writing an article for TESOL’s AL Forum (forthcoming, March 2023).
Profs. Lake and Weger continue to innovate their Fundamentals of Legal Writing II course, which focuses on the scholarly legal writing genre.
Presented online webinar for Tashkent State University of Law on the topic “The Benefits of Extensive Reading & Listening in Studying Law in English”
Organized a “Legal English Book Club” discussion with guest Alissa Hartig, Professor of Linguistics at Portland State University, on her use of Jeffrey P. Kaplan’s book Linguistics and Law in her course on linguistics and law titled, You Have the Right to Remain Silent: Language and the Law. (Dec. 7, 2022)
Interviewed Georgetown Law professors of legal writing Eun Hee Han and Jonah Perlin for the Multilingual Lawyer series for the USLawEssentials Law & Language Podcast. The episode (to be published in January) focused on international students in legal writing courses.
Completed co-teaching (with Prof. Daniel Edelson, Seton Hall Law) a 10-week online legal English course titled “Reading US Cases” for Ukrainian graduate law students at Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University. (The course was part of a larger initiative born by collaboration between USAID and the Global Legal Skills community through which a number of US law professors have been teaching courses, giving guest lectures, and supporting English language law publication for law schools in Ukraine.)
As you hopefully now realize, there is no “Final Case Assignment” for the Legal English II class. This is all part of a semi-elaborate April Fool’s Day prank. 🙂
For readers not in my Legal English II class, here’s the email that was sent to my students today:
Hi everyone,
Our sincere apologies but there’s one additional Crim Pro case assignment we neglected to include in the syllabus and which needs to be completed before Monday.
BONUS Part 1: My own greatest and worst April Fool’s Day prank was my senior year in college. I was taking a large-lecture European History class. And in addition to the weekly lecture, we also met once a week in small sections with a Teaching Assistant. For one assignment, we had to write a 3 to 5 page paper, and I realized it was due on April 1.
So after I finished writing my paper, I also wrote an alternative version of my paper. Except it was just 4 pages of the text “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeated over and over again. And if you’re not familiar with the horror movie The Shining, there’s a climactic scene where an author is going mad and his wife goes into his office and looks at all of the pages he’s been typing for weeks, and she realizes they all have that phrase over and over and over. Very chilling!
Anyway, back to the story, I went in to the history department office, found my Teaching Assistant’s in-box (amidst a wall of many Teaching Assistant in-boxes), and then put the alternative paper at the top of the pile and my real paper at the bottom.
The following week in our small section, I brought a couple extra copies of the real paper just in case anything went wrong. And it definitely did.
At the end of class, my Teaching Assistant approached me tentatively and said, “Um…Professor Hunt would like to meet with you.” I said, “Is this about the paper?” And he said, “Um…you better just go talk with Professor Hunt.”
I walked across campus to Professor Hunt’s office, and the Teaching Assistant followed behind me. I went into Professor Hunt’s office, and I asked, “Is this about the paper?” And she said, “Yes.” I said, “You know that’s from The Shining, right?” And she said, “Yes. That’s why everyone was worried. We had a big meeting about this and discussed whether this was a threat.”
I said, “It was meant to be an April Fool’s joke. I put my real paper in the TA’s in-box.” And I looked at my TA and he uncomfortably shook his head and replied, “I didn’t see it there.” And I thought, “Oh crap. This isn’t going well.”
I then pulled out one of my extra copies of the paper and said, “See, I really did write the paper. Here’s a copy!” And Professor Hunt replied, “Oh, you just happen to have a copy of the paper now?” And I thought, “This is really not going well.”
But somehow I was able to persuade her and the Teaching Assistant that I did not create this elaborate prank just to buy extra time to write the paper. I was a senior, I wasn’t worried about my grade, and I this was not a difficult paper to write. So there was no bigger agenda.
Finally they decided they could trust me and I walked out of the office and across campus picturing what the meeting and discussion with the professor and all the Teaching Assistants must have been like. I felt terrible. But then I also thought, “Well, at least they’ll always remember me!: 🙂
BONUS Part 2: One of the greatest April Fool’s Day jokes ever in American modern history was in 1985 when Sports Illustrated magazine published an article about an amazing baseball player named Sidd Finch who no one had really heard of but who could throw faster than any player ever had. This was pre-internet and most people didn’t realize for at least a week or two that it was an April Fool’s joke.
And the only real clue was in the sub-heading of the article–“He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball.” The first letter of each word in that sub-heading spells out: “Happy April Fool’s Day — a(h) fib.”
Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.
The below blog post from EAP Essentials–“Should we teach grammar? Yes but no but!” by Olwyn Alexander is a thoughtful and healthy reaction to the shift away from “teaching grammar,” which itself has been a reaction to the perceived flaws in the traditional ways of teaching grammar. However, there’s been a shift back towards the teaching of grammar–conditioned on the premise that it’s “done right”–as more thought and research has gone into better ways to help students acquire grammar.
What the “right” or “best” way to teach grammar is is still up for debate. But overall there is a recognition that grammar is not sufficiently acquired just by exposure (e.g., Krashen and the “natural method”), particularly when it comes to academic English (or legal English for that matter.) Intentional effort and guidance is needed to help learners acquire the grammar they need to communicate effectively at the academic English level.
But from that starting point of recognition, there is still a wide divergence on understanding and belief as to what “done right” ultimately means. I definitely don’t have all the answers. But I do have a few beliefs on the topic:
1. Form should follow function: The grammar that is studied should hue as closely to the content being studied and the communicative needs associated with that content. In this regard, a field like legal English is ideal from a teaching perspective because we have ready-made content and communicative purposes. It’s just a matter of scaffolding the content and then mining it for the grammar needed.
2. Grammar Fluency: It’s not enough just to learn and practice an aspect of grammar. There need to be repeated, natural exposures. And ideally in the regular course of studying the content. It’s hard to contrive natural ways to encounter grammar structures. But it’s a lot easier if you start with the content, work backwards to identify the grammar needs associated with it, and then develop grammar focus and curriculum based on those materials. And that allows for repeated exposures. Additional thought on repeated exposures: One of the advantages kids have is that they like repetition. As evidence, I cite the number of times my kids have watched and sung the songs from “Frozen” and other Disney movies as well as the number of times children like to read the same book over and over. Adults, on the other hand, are prone to getting bored. And that’s significant because motivation is a significant component of language learning. So creativity is key in figuring out how to generate repeated exposures for adult learners.
3. Ear Training: I think this aspect of grammar learning is vastly underrepresented in discussions of how to teach grammar. Especially since so much of grammar comes down to having a sense of what “sounds right.”
As native speakers of English, not only do we spend very little time thinking about the rules of the grammar we use, for the most part we never thought about them when we learned the appropriate grammar. This is particularly true of articles, prepositions, and -s endings (e.g., 3rd person and plurals.)
These are grammar points that so many of our LLM students struggle with. And these also happen to be parts of speech that are harder to hear, especially if your ear is not used to hearing them. In other words, if you can train your ear to hear those sounds, then you’ll hear them more and you’ll develop a sense of what sounds right and start using them more accurately in your own speech and writing.
There is of course much more to learning and teaching grammar than my above points. But Alexander’s blog post got me thinking about what drives much of my focus and decision-making in teaching grammar to my students, so I thought I would try to add to the conversation. Feel free to share your own thoughts.
Here are the first few paragraphs of Alexander’s blog post from EAP Essentials along with a “Continue reading” link at the end.
I was asked recently by a head of pathways programmes at an international college whether we should teach grammar in EAP. This manager was under pressure from some teachers to introduce a more structured approach to teaching and testing grammar. Some years previously, prompted by feedback from an external moderator, they had developed a bespoke grammar workbook, which was ‘aligned with the topics taught in the course, [covering] the language features which are considered to be salient in scholarly English [and targeting] areas where students show weaknesses when it comes to academic writing’. The workbook covers language patterns, such as noun phrases, active and passive voice, conditionals and modal verbs. However, teachers on the programmes have a number of issues with the resource:
There is little time to teach grammar in the course
It feels artificial to teach grammar this way (grammar rules and explanations, followed by practice)
It does not address all issues that students have when it comes to grammar
