We are Mauricio Muñoz (a teacher) and Adela Pérez del Viso (a lawyer and trainee teacher), the two Legal English teachers at the Colegio de Abogados de San Luis, the San Luis (Argentina) Bar Association.
My idea of teaching Legal English started in 1998 when I took a course at an Academy (located on Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, U.K.). My teacher was, by then, Mr. Brian Catlow. The organizers made us visit different courtrooms in Cambridge and in London. It was fascinating.
Afterwards, I got to know about the ILEC exam, which was a huge academic improvement: now we had a purpose for these studies, a method, a set of contents, a book (and now more than a book), etc. I sat for the Ilec exam in 2009, after two complete years of hard study.
Now we organize these courses at the Bar Association, and we know that only some students will come and stay: those who have a very good command of the language, and at the same time those who are keen on the legal field.
During this year we organized two “modules”: the first one, based on General Principles and Contracts. (with all the units related to Contracts); the second module, devoted to Company Law (3 units) plus Labour/Employment Law.
The decision to divide the whole course in 3 or 4 modules have allowed us to set some goals which seem to be not so far in time; at the same time, it allows other students (who have not started with the original group) to join us, for instance, at the 2nd module.
We organize every class with the material presented by the Ilec book, along with videos taken from the internet, movies, trailers (in this sense, John Grisham´s books, movies and trailers are quite good), some University classes that can be retrieved from the internet (for instance, some classes from American universities, related to Contracts), etc. Only when time presses, we work on the ILEC book alone, which is quite complete.
Next year we are planning to