I had been a legal practitioner in China for 15 years. It took all my courage to resign and come to a different country to study law. No pains, no gains. Navigated by the legal education here, I found my direction in career – I established a cross-border legal service company.
Difficult Legal culture
Got admission of the Maine law is a new beginning for my professional career. The story started more than ten years ago. In China, National Judicial Examination certificate, Certificate of Certified Public Accountant, and Legal English certification (LEC) are most difficult certificates to get. When I got two of them, I want to challenge the legal English test. This test more like a small pattern of American bar exam. In my opinion, if I could pass the LEC, it will give me confidence to challenge the American Bar exam. If a legal person owns legal certification of two countries, just like backlash for driving. After four years hard learning, I passed the LEC, and got admission of the Maine Law, became a LL.M student. Actually, Legal English is so hard. American law derived from English law. British suffered Norman Conquest in 1066. French, Latin, English were concurrent at that time. In this historic background, Legal English is consisted of Latin, French, Medieval English, terminology, jargon, and so on.
At first, I read a judgment of appellate court opinion for at least four hours. It’s so complex, but so important. For example, fruits of poison tree, cat out of the bag, yellow-dog contract, red herring rule, and so on. I think, I was make deal with animals and foods.
I used to think that having a certain legal basis would be helpful to learn legal English. To my surprise, as I started to learn legal English, I found my way of thinking had limited my understanding and study of American law system. Different from Civil law system, in case law system, substance law and procedure law are both valued as same importance in their own way. I am very impressed by how the procedure be fairly used to promote the substance justice in U.S.legal system.
Strange Legal grammar
Does the American law need grammar?
May be not. Who care?
If a lay person wants to use grammar to analysis common law or statute, he will be confused. I have ever read a long sentence, contained more than 160 words, but never had a comma. I gazed this sentence for half an hour, and asked myself, where is the linguist?
Judge made law, also let me confuse. Judges similarly don’t like talk about something directly, often repeated, overlapped, just like, “avoid and null”. Finally, I found the truth, repeated and overlapped is a characteristic of common law, exert this special language to realize preciseness.
The legal eagles so proud of this character: lay person couldn’t understand it; everyone need a lawyer.
Compare with this. Chinese law is so kind. Everyone can read the case; everyone can be a judge. My mother always express criticism about some cases with me, debate with me intensely. Absolutely, mother is always right.
Study in Law school
I could not find the word to describe the difficulty I feel to study in U.S. law school. It will be too early for me to go to bed at 2 a.m.
After my friends knew that I have Constitution, Criminal law and Property for my first semester in U.S. law school, they showed me their deeply sympathy and concern. They knew it will not be easy for me whose mother language is not English.
According to ABA, law students need to spend at least 30 hours in extensive reading for one credit. Even my U.S. classmates spend at least 6 hours every day for reading, as a non-English speaker, I have no other choice but to work more hard and spend more time on my reading.
The law class in U.S is Socratic teaching method, the professor teaches the law by questioning and inspiring the students. So, class performance extremely important. For foreign students, only by fully pre-course preparation, and constantly improving the responsiveness and communication skills, can they gradually adapt to the law school life.
Establish a cross-border consulting firm
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. An idea occurred to me when I was struggling with my study: what feels like for a lay person, especially Chinese lay person, when they are facing the U.S legal system? With the deeper corporation between China and America, conflicts and disagreements are unavoidable. Can we come up with some non-government mechanism to help both sides solve the conflicts more efficiently? How about an intermediate legal service helping to connect both sides with better service and better communication?
A story of my friend confirmed my determination to carry out my thoughts. He is a businessman and doing business with American clients for a long time. One of his U.S. clients owed him one million dollars and announced for bankruptcy. He hired a U.S. attorney to recover his loss, but he never heard from the attorney since then. He turned to me for advice. I suggested him to contact to his attorney to figure out what section of the bankruptcy law applied and take actions depends on the law. My friend told me it would be much better if there is a company who could help him to connect the U.S. lawyer and monitor the whole process for him.
After a lot of hard work, I set up Yi & Yang Consulting company with Yanzhu Yang, a S.J.D student in Maine law who also gets admission to the NY bar. Our company comes up with a simple idea to make cross-border legal service easier. We do not provide legal advice. we help our clients connect with the reliable overseas lawyer and optimize the communication between clients and overseas lawyers, to achieve maximum practice efficiency while delivering access to justice.
We believe that we are on the right path. We will try our best to help improving the communication between the countries. The stage extends as far as the heart goes.
(translator:Weihan Yi Yanzhu Yang)
Weihan Yi
admitted to practice law in China, worked at the Judiciary in China for over 15 years. He has the Certificate of Accounting Professional. Now, he is J.D candidate in University of Maine School of Law. Weihan also is an accomplished author, recently published the book, Revelation of corruption (China Legal Publishing House). In 2008, he published Red Banker (China Procurational Press). He has further helped edit and publish Temperature of law (China Procurational Press) and Out of corruption (China Social Press).