Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 And the, the attorney, the senior attorney told her that when you're writing for an American attorney, you have to write as if the attorney is stupid. <laugh> like for the amount of explanation and
Speaker 1 00:00:16 Yay. Oh, yay.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 Welcome to the us law essentials law and language podcast, the legal English podcast for non-native English speakers that helps you improve your English, listening, improve your legal English vocabulary and build your knowledge of American legal culture.
Speaker 4 00:00:37 Before we begin today's episode, I wanted to remind you that us law essentials offers online legal English, and online us law courses. Our courses are designed for students bar exam candidates, attorneys, and translators. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Daniel at Daniel, us law, essentials.com or visit us law essentials.com and join us on LinkedIn and Facebook. And now today's episode.
Speaker 3 00:01:10 Welcome to us law essentials law and language podcast. I'm your host. Steven Horowitz today's episode continues our series of interviews with multilingual lawyers and law school professionals. Today's guest is Karen Lundquist, the assistant professor of ESL and legal skills at the university of Minnesota law school, a practicing business and employment law attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the founder of legal writing online.org. She's also very involved in animal advocacy. Uh, Karen is a graduate of William Mitchell college of law, which is now the Mitchell Hamline law school. Uh, and she's also a graduate of Mount Holyoke college. And she's also taught English for 11 years in Rome, Italy, and she taught Ling English courses in Santiago, Chile, uh, in the past as well. So hi, Karen and welcome.
Speaker 0 00:02:08 Hello, Steven. Welcome thing to to you too. And thank you for the invitation. I'm thrilled to be here.
Speaker 3 00:02:14 Yeah, it's really great to have you here. So, um, I guess the first question I'm gonna ask you is have you ever lived in any other countries?
Speaker 0 00:02:22 I have, as you just said, I, I talked, I, I lived in Italy. I've lived there for 12, or I lived there for 12 years. Yeah. Total. I studied there for my junior year abroad and then returned after I graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1990 and lived there for another 11 years. And for about 10, 11 of those years, I was teaching English as a foreign language. And, um, I've lived a summer in Mexico in GU WATO Uhhuh during law school, my, um, the summer after my first year of law school. And then I've spent about a year total living in Santiago. Um, the three occasions when I've taught courses, lead English courses at the university of Chile at the law school there I've been there. And then right after law school, I spent about eight months in Santiago doing a research project on the Chilean criminal justice reforms in, um, with a Chilean NGO. And that would've been 2000 and 2005, 2006.
Speaker 3 00:03:23 And I'm guessing that the languages you speak might be Italian and Spanish, is that right? Yes.
Speaker 0 00:03:29 Yes. I speak Italian and Spanish Italian better than my Spanish I've been studying it for 35 years is, is when I started studying Italian, uh, 35 years ago. And so I then Spanish. Um, I studied Latin. That was my first foreign language that I started studying in ninth grade in junior high. And I studied German for a couple of years when I was living in Rome. And I've also studied a little bit of French, not very much so.
Speaker 3 00:03:59 Oh, wow. So you could, you could sounds like you could sort of get by or fake your way through a lot of, uh, other languages as well.
Speaker 0 00:04:06 Um, I don't know, maybe <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:04:08 Order order some food, maybe a beer or something.
Speaker 0 00:04:11 Oh, that would, yes. That be OK with otherwise you return to the universal gestures, right. Or right speak English, hoping that people speak English. <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:04:21 You? Here's, here's a question I always, uh, like to, I'm always curious about when people are, have, have, have, uh, developed a high level of proficiency and other languages. Can you do math in your head in Italian?
Speaker 0 00:04:35 I probably could have when I lived there Uhhuh, uh, mean now it's very different. I, I moved back to the us in 2001 Uhhuh. I was there from 1990 until August, 2001, I returned to Minneapolis right before nine 11. Um, so at the time when I was living there, probably, I don't know how, I mean, I, I don't remember whether I did math problems if I was in a store in English or Italian, probably in English. I think there's certain things that you do, um, in your mother tongue, um, that you learn at such a young age numbers are really hard in the second language. Yeah. And you know, and so I doubt I did. Um, I know I, I saw it in Italian and I would dream in Italian after, as I was there for so many years doing math problems, probably not. Sure.
Speaker 3 00:05:24 Um, do you ever have occasion to, uh, to use either of either, uh, either Italian or Spanish in your work at all? Or, or is this ever an advantage?
Speaker 0 00:05:36 I, when I first started practicing, so I graduated from Mitchell in 2005 and I started practicing in 2006. I got, I was sworn in, in April, 2006 because I spent that period down in Santiago right after I sat for the bar. And one of the reasons I went to Santiago and also went, spent that summer in Mexico, was to improve my Spanish. And my initial practice was working with, um, well with the Hispanic community in business law matters. So it was with the partners, the business partners I had at, at the time we were aiming, you know, we were focusing on that, that market, that target market, one of my business partners at the time was an, an Argentinian attorney licensed also here in Minneapolis. So I did, I spent a, I used my Spanish a lot. Um, and then since then I kind of moved on to doing other things. I got back into teaching. So now I don't use it at all. Uh, the Italian I've been doing Italian lessons for the past, well, for past few months. So I use it that way, but nothing with work. I like reading about the law in Italian just to, um, improve my vocabulary, but certainly not for work.
Speaker 3 00:06:53 And how do you study Italian when you take Italian lessons? Do you have a, a tutor or a class or dual lingo or something like that?
Speaker 0 00:07:00 I use, uh, it is a website called verbally and, um, I have
Speaker 3 00:07:06 V E R V L I N G.
Speaker 0 00:07:08 Exactly. Yep. verbally.com. And you can access and get in contact with teachers from tons of different languages from around the world. And you set up the, the lessons it's like using Skype, you set up the lessons through the website and, um, I'm very chatty on the, the lessons. So we just talk and I read stuff where I write stuff. And we talk about that. Normally we just talk cuz I like to chat <laugh> oh,
Speaker 3 00:07:34 Totally. Okay. So now I wanna ask you about your work and your work sort of has several components mm-hmm <affirmative> so the first one I wanna ask you about is the, your you're the assistant professor of ESL English is a second language mm-hmm <affirmative> and legal skills at the university of Minnesota law school. Can you talk a little bit about, um, what you do, who you teach, how you teach it there?
Speaker 0 00:07:59 Sure. So I started teaching at the university of Minnesota in 2011, so 10 years ago, and I've for that whole time I've taught in the LLM program and taught legal writing. That was the initial class that I was teaching. Um, as my class kind of evolved, we, me and the, the, my supervisor, the director of the, the LLM program at the time kind of realized that my course wasn't only legal writing, that I also focused a lot on legal skills doing mock interviews, you mock negotiations, those type of, of activities. So we changed it into my classes, legal writing and legal skills. So hence the name of my, my title with university. And I worked just with the LLL M students. So, you know, 99.5, 5% probably of the students over the 10 years that I've been there have been ESL students. We've had a few who have come through who are English, mother, tongue, um, a couple of, of Irish students. Um, but you know, for the, the vast majority are English as a second language learner. So hence the ESL and legal skills title.
Speaker 3 00:09:10 And, and how do you, how is teaching in your experience teaching, um, legal writing to students from other countries? How does that differ? Um, from teaching legal writing to students, from who, who are native English speakers from the us? Like what, how do you, how do you approach it differently? How do you integrate the language teaching, things like that?
Speaker 0 00:09:31 Well, I think there's different. There's many challenges that the LLM students face. The first challenge is of course, the fact that they're reading and writing about the law in a second language, which is difficult. It's difficult to do that in English and your native language as well. So that of course is part of it. And there's students have different language levels with some there's not a whole lot to address dramatically. Um, and others simply aren't as strong. So there is more English and grammar vocabulary in that. And in, in the, in what I help them with, I don't focus on grammar night classes that we focus on analysis, legal, writing, the legal skills, more of the law school. It's not a, it's not a grammar class. I don't think that's the, the purpose of the class. But I think the biggest challenge that L LM students face is that they're all practicing attorneys or law school graduates in their home country.
Speaker 0 00:10:31 They have been trained in a way of doing legal analysis and of doing legal writing. And we ask them to try to unlearn that and learn a new way of doing it the us way, which is very different from what they have learned, both for the writing style, for how we do analysis for the expectations. Um, and I think it's a lot easier for JD students who come in and they're, you know, they're a tabular Raza, you know, they don't have these preconceived ideas of what is legal writing, what is legal analysis? We tell them, this is how you do it. And like, oh, okay. And they learn it. And that unlearning, I think is really, really challenging for LLM students. Some of them get it. And some of them, despite their best efforts still don't quite always get it. And, you know, that's okay. I can't expect to make them into us attorneys in a semester or even a year. Um, so that's, I think is a, is a really big challenge. Just trying to understand why do us attorneys, why is this expected? Why do us attorneys write in this way? And how do I do that? That I think is, is a challenge.
Speaker 3 00:11:41 Yeah. I had a, a conversation with a student from China one time who explained that if he wrote the, if he wrote the way that we were, that he was being taught by us to write, um, in, in the legal writing class, if he wrote like that for his professor back in China, it, it would be considered insulting. It would be considered too explicit and sort of too obvious and not giving the reader enough credit. And it sort of, I mean, does that, I mean, that's just one little piece of what you're talking about. Yes. The idea of like reader, responsible writing versus writer, responsible writing, that's just one piece of it. So
Speaker 0 00:12:22 Yeah. Let me tell you a funny story. We have, um, one of the big law firms here in, in Minneapolis was Ry Benson. Now it's Ry bakers and Daniels. They merged with a firm in Indianapolis, if I'm not mistaken. And for many years we've had a, uh, or the Ry F and Benson just to call it that, which I'm used to, um, sends over one or two of their associates to do a LLM program with us, the associate who was here, I think she graduated in 2019. They're great students, you know, high level ish. They work with us attorneys. They deal with, um, do with us a us clients. Of course, Marlene explained to us in class one day that she was working with a senior attorney at, at this firm in, or the office in bang in Beijing or Shanghai. And the, the attorney, the senior attorney told her that when you're writing for an American attorney, you have to write as if the attorney is stupid. <laugh> like for the amount of explanation. Yeah. Okay. Obviously you don't think that, but it's that same idea. Yes. That we expect this very explicit explanation of how you get from a to B um, you know, from this is your, your issue statement to the conclusion we want. It all explained where in China, other countries that would be insulting mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah.
Speaker 3 00:13:54 Absolut. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:13:55 And I tell that story all the time to my students. Like, don't think they're stupid, but realize that we expect more explanation.
Speaker 3 00:14:02 Yeah. That's, I mean, that's a really helpful perspective to get that you're stepping into like, everything's on a different angle on a different plane and you gotta start thinking about it that way. And then the irrational starts to feel more rational, I guess. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> or it can possibly feel rational. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so, um, oh, and something I forgot to mention in your introduction, you, you have a book published, a legal English textbook published
Speaker 0 00:14:26 Mm-hmm <affirmative> I do. Mm-hmm
Speaker 3 00:14:27 <affirmative> the title? What, say the title of it?
Speaker 0 00:14:29 Um, legal writing and legal skills for foreign LLM students. It was published 2017 by west academic publishing here in St. Paul.
Speaker 3 00:14:40 And, and do you use that in your teaching or is that something, is that for, for the specific course that you teach during the semester?
Speaker 0 00:14:47 Mm-hmm <affirmative> I do, yes. Yes. I use, um, well, one of the units, it depends on my mood and depends on the class and the students, but, um, each of the, the units in, in the, in the book, in the textbook deals with a different client matter and a different legal issue and has different skills activities that are related to it. Um, so yeah, I, I like using there's a unit on trespass and nuisance that I, that I love dealing that, that deals with, uh, an animal rescue that is next door to the client that the students are dealing with over the course of the semester, a company called straight out advertising and straight out advertising has a next door neighbor, happy tails animal rescue that has some dogs that bark a lot. They've kind of increased the number of dogs that they're keeping at the office. There's a dog that comes into the parking lot. They have some other issues that are going on and they have to analyze this trespass and nuisance fact pattern. So it works really well.
Speaker 3 00:15:49 Oh, okay. We're gonna put a link, uh, in the show notes to, um, to, uh, Karen's book. So if anybody wants to take a look at that, they can do that. And then you, you were talking about animals, um, which I think is not a coincidence in the, in the fact pattern in your, in your book, um, because you're also very involved in animal advocacy. So what is animal advocacy?
Speaker 0 00:16:11 Well, and I'll just make a mention, like almost there's 12 units in my, in my book, Uhhuh, um, you know, beginning, intermediate in advance, there's four for each, I think of those 12, probably eight or nine of 'em have some connection with animals. I always weaved in animals in some way. So, um, so my animal advocacy, um, I work, I volunteer with three different nonprofits here in Minneapolis, humane society of the United States, Minnesota federated humane societies, and also animal folks. And I volunteer with a program of HS, U S and also the two other organizations. We work on legislation, whether that's federal legislation, state, local ordinances that, um, that better protect animals. Um, and so my work involves, um, I've done some lobbying at both the state and the local level also with, with my federal reps, um, for advocating, for, or against specific, um, bills that, that better protect animals. I do. Um, I help with research on different issues that come up. I've worked here in Minneapolis. Um, we've had, we've been trying to get Minneapolis to pass a bill that bans the sale of new fur products. And so I was working with a group, a grassroots organization that was started here to work with, or to try to get the Minneapolis city council to pass that. And so I work in just whatever, legally relates to animal issues into animal welfare and, um, eliminating and fighting animal cruelty.
Speaker 3 00:17:56 So, so the, the, one of the takeaways from this for me is this is a much bigger field than I had had previously conceived of. And the other takeaway is you must really love animals. Do you, do you have any pets?
Speaker 0 00:18:09 I do, yes. We have four dogs. We have four little Chihuahua, well, three chihuahuas and one who is a rat terrier mix, we think, and then we have two parakeets. Yeah. I love animals. I love animals. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:18:23 Yeah. And, and, uh, are they, have you trained them to be able to advocate for themselves now?
Speaker 0 00:18:30 No, that, that I, we, that has, we we're, we're still working sometimes they're Chihuahua. So sometimes the house training can be a little bit of a challenge in Minnesota winters. So especially with Chihuahua, so advocating for themselves might be difficult. <laugh>, that's why we have people advocating on their behalf <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:18:49 But I was thinking you could also start a, a legal writing online for dogs or for birds.org, um, to, to, uh, to help train other, uh, animals in, in the, in the skills of legal writing. But I guess that's a future project
Speaker 0 00:19:04 That, that could be, that could be, yeah, I don't know about the traffic that that would get <laugh>. Um,
Speaker 3 00:19:12 And, and then you also, uh, you work as a, as a business and employment law attorney, and, and I think you had mentioned to me previously that ties in with your work at university of Minnesota law school.
Speaker 0 00:19:24 It does also with my animal animal work cuz one of my kind of niche focuses is doing, um, is working with animal friendly and vegan businesses. Um, so if, uh, if there's a rescue that needs some sort of legal assistance or one of my clients is a vegan business, um, or I was working with someone who had an issue with a breeder, for example, that's kind of what, what I like to focus on. It's not my, it's a very small part of my practice. The, the large part of my practice is doing pro bono work with just different businesses here in Minneapolis, on non litigation matters. And on a lot of those client matters. I involve my students at the law school, um, the LLM students, a lot of the LM students, as you know, wanna sit for the New York bar exam. So they have a requirement to do 50 hours of pro bono work. Mm-hmm <affirmative> sure. And a lot of them do that pro pro bono work with me. So they work on client matters, researching writing memos in the past pre COVID. I would have them meet with clients with me and, um, they would explain to the client, the research that it, they had done some have helped me with drafting contracts. So it's a great way for the students to get practice, um, both speaking English and also gaining some of the hours they need for the New York bar.
Speaker 3 00:20:44 Oh wow. What a, what a wonderful intermixing of very disparate interests and skills and fields. Um, and, and also, it sounds really fortunate for the students that they get to work with somebody like you, who has a multilingual background and has experience working cross culturally and with people from different language backgrounds. Mm-hmm
Speaker 0 00:21:03 <affirmative>. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I know what they're going through as they're struggling with the challenges of a second language living in a sec, in a new country with a different culture, all of those challenges that you, that you face when you're living abroad.
Speaker 3 00:21:20 And let me ask you one more question now. Um, is there any advice that you've ever received in your, in your work, in your career that, that you found particularly helpful?
Speaker 0 00:21:30 I have and the, the advice, there were two on two separate occasions. So two pieces of advice, both of which came from attorneys at a firm that I was working with during law school. Um, I was clerking at a firm called now it's nickel castor at the time it was Nichols, castor and Anderson. It's an employment discrimination firm in Minneapolis. They do just plaintiff site or employment. It's not only employment discrimination, but they work just with plaintiff matters in employment, whether it's discrimination, wage cases, over time, things like that. Very good firm, well respected, great attorneys, good writers, advocates. So at the, during law school, I clerked there for about a year, my second and my third year. And I was working with one of the partners, Jim castor. And I don't know we were working on some case or something like that. And, and he said to me, you know, Karen, what makes a good attorney?
Speaker 0 00:22:28 It's not whether you know, the law or not. It doesn't take anything for someone to memorize the elements of a claim or to know what a know, what a case says, what makes a good attorney is what the attorney does with the facts and how an attorney uses those facts, whether of his or her case or the facts of the case law that they find. And I, and I, I repeat that story to my students all the time to, because there's such a difference of how we use facts in the common law system and here in the states, as opposed to how they have to use it, use them and how we use cases and analog analogize them or distinguish them. And I, I, I find students struggle with that so much that they, they have those conclusory statements. They don't use facts. So I tell 'em that story.
Speaker 0 00:23:18 And then I tell 'em facts are your friends use facts? So that was one that stuck with me and that would've been 2004, that, that, that Jim castor told me that. So that's one piece of advice. And then the other one was, was with another, uh, attorney there. Nick may, um, is his name he's still here in min. Both of them are still here in min Minneapolis, you know, decades of practice. And as a law student, I was asking Nick one day how he organized his cases, you know, cuz that's one of the challenges here in the, in, in our system is you get all of these cases that you print up, you have all over the place, these photocopies, what the heck do you do with them? How do you make sense of them?
Speaker 0 00:24:02 Nick's advice was also kind of a reminder that sometimes low tech is the best. So he told me he would simply, he would organize the cases into piles based on, you know, the issues that the cases were dealt with and how he was going to use them in the brief for the memo that he was writing. And then he would get one of those big, you know, the, the binder clips and just bind them together and then write on the, the top case, what the issue, what the issue of all of those cases for, and just organize 'em that way. So when he was dealing with one part of his memo that dealt with a specific issue, he would find the cases and then, you know, go through them with the notes written on top, very low tech, but he found it worked. And so I tell that to my students too, because they also struggle with that.
Speaker 0 00:24:49 You know, what do you do with all these cases? So I tell 'em, you know, kind of, Hey, we deal with this too. This is the advice that I got and I found works for me. And I also use the advice to tell them to print stuff up that sometimes you have to have stuff in a printed hard copy. Cuz I find that students were so used to reading on our computer, that they try to do their legal writing with every thing still on their computer. It's like you can't, I mean, you simply can't, you have to be able to go through cases, flip pages and pick 'em up off of your desk. And I try to remind them and you have to write on 'em, you know, you have to take notes. So, you know, what is this CA, which is where is that case? And then you see your notes and then you can find it. So that was the other advice of just how do we deal with these again, these cases, uh, and make sense of them as we're writing some sort of a document.
Speaker 3 00:25:43 Oh wow. Yeah. That's that's um, having things that you can see in front of you and quickly essentially toggle between, it's very difficult to do that on the computer.
Speaker 0 00:25:54 You can, I mean, I don't think you can, you know, scrolling through, through a document on your computer is a lot less efficient than flipping through pages, you know, of a photocopy that you have.
Speaker 3 00:26:05 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:26:06 So, I mean, it's just, I think it's just that visual aside from the fact, you know, there's a lot of research that shows that you remember things better if you write 'em down. Um, so I think that's part of it is also I'm, I'm a big, big proponent of book briefing and I teach that to my students, you know, doing notes, you know, some abbreviations in the margins and getting them away from just the highlighting, which I find pretty useless. And um, and to do book briefing, you have to have a hard copy. I mean, you simply have to, and then to, again, to access that later on, you just, I think it's maybe I'm old fashioned. I don't think so. I think it's
Speaker 3 00:26:44 Just, I think, I think there's something to that. I think there's some of the gaps that where, where the, the digital world doesn't quite match up and, and so I it's really terrific advice. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, and one last question. Do you have any, uh, any podcast recommendations?
Speaker 0 00:27:00 Oh gosh. Yes. I love podcasts. Um, two of my favorite absolute favorite podcasts are both part of the, the cafe.com world. Um, cafe.com is, you know, website where it's all legal related and they have a couple of broadcasts or podcasts. One of which is with, um, pre Perra and it's stay tuned with pre comes out. I think every Wednesday, he was the former us attorney for the Southern district of New York. You said the graduation speaker at your graduation. Yeah. Stay. And he just talks about his great guests. Not all of them are legally related a lot are. And, um, he is very entertaining, very personable, um, great questions, great interviewer. I love listening to, to pre and then another podcast in the cafe.com universe is a newer one called now and then with two American historians, Heather cock Richardson, Joanne Newman. And they talk about us history, but link it to the present. Um, and that's fascinating. I, I love that one. I, I love history. I read a lot of history and um, so really enjoy listening to them. They really bring it to life. So even people who aren't a history buff I think would enjoy it. They're very entertaining. They've got a great energy between the two of them and chemistry. So I love those two. Those are two of my favorite. I got a whole bunch of other ones that I like, wow. Alman is good. Which
Speaker 3 00:28:33 One?
Speaker 0 00:28:33 John man, with Helen Highwater with John Hallman, um, the animal law PA podcast that I mentioned to you as well.
Speaker 3 00:28:42 Oh yeah. I was gonna say any, any recommendations for sources, for people who wanna learn more about animal advocacy and what's the name of that podcast?
Speaker 0 00:28:50 It's it's animal law and it's part of our, our henhouse. So our henhouse, I guess, is the, the umbrella company. And then it's the animal law podcast within that. And that's on our henhouse.org is where that one is. I love that one, the vegan Vanguard, they have some podcasts that are also especially dealing with, with labor law, um, are really some interesting ones, ones as well.
Speaker 3 00:29:17 So you've got an interesting and, and very diverse library of, of podcast interests. So, uh, I appreciate learning about all of these. I'm gonna add them all to my, my, um, subscribe section of my podcast at mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, podcast. Um, well, Karen, thank you so much for, for joining us today. It's been a real, real pleasure to have you here.
Speaker 0 00:29:36 Thank you. Invitation. It's been a pleasure
Speaker 3 00:29:40 And thanks to everybody for listening to us, law essentials, law and language podcast, and stay essential.
