Legal genres and lawyers’ training
is there a match between the teaching process and the demands of professional life?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4151/S0718-09342025011801152Keywords:
specialized discourse, writing text, legal genres, lawyers, law studentsAbstract
This research aim is to establish the concordance between the type, frequency of production, and perceived level of difficulty of legal genres produced by law students during their academic training and by lawyers in their professional practice. We developed a quantitative-descriptive investigation with a non-random and intentional sample, made up of 336 voluntary participants (211 law students and 125 lawyers), who answered a questionnaire designed and validated for this study. Among the main results, in terms of frequency, the Contract is the genre most produced by lawyers; on the other hand, in the case of students, it is the Demand. Regarding the degree of difficulty, the most difficult genre for lawyers and students is the Jurisprudence Unification Resource. In conclusion, in general, lawyers produce a greater variety of genres than students and do so more frequently. In addition, a trend is identified that indicates that, both in the case of lawyers and students, the higher the production frequency reports, the lower the perceived difficulty reports, and vice versa. The study of legal genres addressed represents empirical evidence of the relationship between the training of lawyers and the requirements of professional life. Our results may be useful for the training of Law students, as well as for the improvement of practicing lawyers.
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