From law to legal English

My general English was good. My mum is Canadian, so I grew up speaking it at home. I know what you’re thinking: that’s not your case. But by the time I finished university, mine wasn’t as good as before. I wasn’t spending as much time at home anymore, and a language only stays sharp if you keep using it. So I made the effort. I built more chances to speak English into my week, and I went back to my old grammar books to improve what I already had.

Legal English was different. That, I had to build completely from scratch. Nobody speaks legal English at home.

I started with ILEC, the only legal English exam that existed at the time. You think I studied for that alone, with a book and nothing else? Of course not. I had a teacher in Genova who also taught legal English at university, guiding me through it. Without her, it would have taken me forever, and I’d have had nobody to ask when something didn’t make sense. A scholarship covered the whole course. I sat the exam in Milan and passed. More importantly, I came out of it with a base I could use at work.

ILEC didn’t make me an expert in any single area of law. That was never the point. It gave me an overview of the vocabulary across different areas, enough to get started, plus practical basics like writing emails and memos. That’s exactly the kind of foundation I give my students in my TOLES 1:1 classes: not everything, just enough to begin.

I came home, finished my traineeship, and passed the Bar exam. But by then, I’d already started teaching English as a second job. I was working as a consultant for my local court, and lawyers and judges I met there told me they wanted to improve their legal English. In 2016, I got my first two groups: one of lawyers, one of judges. That’s when I discovered TOLES, the Test of Legal English Skills. I taught it, and some of my students passed with high scores. They were happy, and so was I.

I realised I’d been teaching without a method, mostly copying what I’d watched my mum do for years. So I decided to build that side properly too, and got TEFL qualified in London.

For the next seven years, SpeechLex stayed my second job while I kept building: a postgraduate specialisation in legal translation, holidays spent at translator conferences at the EU Commission, and eventually, the courage to attend a conference of EULETA, the European Legal English Teachers’ Association. That’s where I felt I had finally found people like me. Former lawyers, linguists, native and non-native English speakers, all doing the same work in different ways, all genuinely good at it. Watching what their students were achieving gave me the courage to take the final step.