1. Skills
Some Dutch-speaking legal professionals can find it challenging at first to speak about legal and file matters in a professional legal environment. Feedback, coaching and confidence building go a long way.
2. Lexis
Terminology and legal vocabulary improvement is almost always a high priority for participants who have not been working in English. The goal of the training here is primarily a better awareness of common mistakes and the lexical resources and skills used to resolve vocabulary and terminology problems.
3. Convention
Some English legal writing tends to be quite good, except that it is marred by easily avoidable and sometimes glaring technical and convention-related mistakes. This part of the programme includes correspondence conventions, various types of legal references, and time expressions.
4. Grammar
The focus of this theme is on getting the verb tenses right. The goal is to boost a Dutch lawyer’s ability to use the full range of English verb tenses to write effectively and conventionally about the law and past, present and future events in legal situations.
5. Syntax.
In this part of the programme, we look at constructing correct, more natural and less convoluted sentences. It includes specific assistance with verb patterns, plurals and conjunctions.
6. Style
This theme is oriented around improving legal writing style in various specific and useful ways. Formality and politeness are also dealt with.
7. Modality
The goal is to improve a lawyer’s ability to write correctly, conventionally and clearly about obligations, entitlements, conditions and hypothetical situations.