How marketable are languages and knowledge in 2 law systems Forum

[chenghsiang]

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[solidsnake]

your hsk isnt that high. but no one cares. if you interview with a particular office (hk, tk, etc) the interview will be oral and no one will care what your test score band is. Also, assuming you want to work for a US firm abroad, biglaw salaries are extremely normalized by market pressures and, as a first year, you will have little to absolutely no leverage in "salary negotiation."

if you really want to capitalize on being a polyglot, go to a m7 bschool and try to get buyside.

[Jaren25]

your hsk isnt that high. but no one cares. if you interview with a particular office (hk, tk, etc) the interview will be oral and no one will care what your test score band is. Also, assuming you want to work for a US firm abroad, biglaw salaries are extremely normalized by market pressures and, as a first year, you will have little to absolutely no leverage in "salary negotiation."

if you really want to capitalize on being a polyglot, go to a m7 bschool and try to get buyside.

second.

[chenghsiang]

Thanks for the replies.

From what I've heard, only English is enough for legal practice even for law office abroad. I suppose my language assets aren't that profitable in BigLaw...

[Grizz]

Chinese companies generally hire American lawyers when they want to do business in the US, and the Americans hire Chinese ones when they want to do business in China. Your knowledge of 2 legal systems isn't gonna help that much.

[NewHere]

Knowledge of two legal systems may or may not be helpful depending on where you end up. There are firms that have a Hong Kong office where they practice both American law and local law. If you worked in a firm like that and wanted to go to the HK office, I imagine it would give you a leg up if you had some familiarity with both systems of law. On the other hand, if you are at an American firm, practicing in New York, knowledge of a foreign legal system will be relevant less frequently: if a US firm, say as part of a complex deal, needs to know about some particular aspect of Chinese law, they will usually hire local counsel in China to advise them. But it would probably not be entirely useless: in cases where what they want to know is a minor point of law, relatively quick to research, they may feel comfortable asking someone inside the firm who knows about the other legal system. (In short: if it were me, I wouldn't spend years getting a second law degree in another country in order to increase my US employability. But if you already have another degree, who knows if it might come in handy.)

Language skills are pretty useful universally. My foreign languages aren't as useful and widespread as Chinese, but even so in two months of working I've been staffed on two cases specifically because they needed someone who was able to read non-English texts.

[Anonymous User]

language skills will be useful in immigration law

[Anonymous User]

Your niche might be to help businessmen from the Chinese world (singapore, hk, mainland, taiwan, chinese vietnamese, chinese malaysian) do business in America.

[friedoska]

I don't think languages are that useful because transactions in foreign offices are conducted mainly in English. I am bilingual in Mandarin and English and being bilingual did not help much during OCI.

[chenghsiang]

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