Week01_Student_Slides

1.

SDU UNIVERSITY
·
LAW SCHOOL
Legal English
English for Jurisprudence
Week 1 — Introduction: the landscape of legal English
Yersinbek Mukhamedzhan · Academic year 2026–2027

2.

LECTURE 1 · WHO IS TEACHING THIS COURSE
Yersinbek Mukhamedzhan
Currently
Senior Associate Counsel
1
Education
LL.B. and LL.M., KIMEP University — both with highest
honours.
Visa
Co-Founder and Director
Synapse Legal
Previously
Senior Counsel, Yandex Go
Platform and gig-economy legal work · 2022–2025
Associate, Centil Law Firm
2
Teaching at SDU
Since Spring 2026 — on one self-imposed condition:
that the course is as practical as it can possibly be.
Three years in private practice · 2019–2022
Everything in this course comes out of work being done this week — not out of a textbook.

3.

WHY THE COURSE IS BUILT THIS WAY
One week in the life — in documents
Monday
14 emails. One of them is the advice. A note of a call with the business team.
Tuesday
A redline of a vendor's services agreement, and a covering email explaining only what the business must decide.
Wednesday
A memorandum on whether a product feature is permitted. Three pages, two readers, relied on for two years.
Thursday
A letter to a regulator. Instructions to counsel in another jurisdiction.
Friday
A power of attorney, a board resolution, and the sign-off email everyone will search for in eighteen months.
How many of these are written in English? For a Kazakhstani lawyer with any international exposure — most of them.

4.

THE PROBLEM THIS COURSE SOLVES
From good law student to useful lawyer
Knowing the law
Universities are good at this. You will
graduate knowing it.
Producing the
document
Doing it in English
Almost no one teaches this. It is the
whole of the first two years of
practice.
Where the gap becomes a wall — and
where the cross-border work is won
or lost.
Kazakhstani lawyers compete for the same cross-border work as lawyers in Warsaw, Dubai and Istanbul. The differentiator is rarely
knowledge of the law. It is the ability to explain that law, in English, to someone who does not know it.

5.

HOW THE COURSE WORKS
Five design principles
1
Practice first
Every topic starts from a document that exists in real practice.
2
A deliberate 50/50
Half common-law English. Half the English of Kazakhstani law explained to a foreign reader.
3
Production in class
Everything graded is drafted in the practical session, under supervision.
4
A cumulative portfolio
Fourteen weeks of drafted documents you can show an employer.
5
Feedback that arrives in time
Redlines back before the next session, while you still remember your choices.

6.

THE BALANCE
You will be standing on the line between two systems
Common-law legal English
The drafting conventions of international transactional
practice
Contracts that try to displace the background law
Reasoning from cases; IRAC and CREAC
The vocabulary your foreign counterparty already thinks
in
Kazakhstani law, in English
Explaining the Civil Code to a reader who has never seen a
code
Concepts with no English equivalent — and how to handle
them
Documents a Kazakhstani court and a foreign client both
accept
The AIFC: a common-law island inside a civil-law country
Most of you will spend your careers writing with one hand in each system — often in the same paragraph.

7.

WHAT YOU WILL PRODUCE
The document map
Week 1
The landscape
A benchmark writing sample
Week 2–3
Professional correspondence
Advice emails · demand letter · engagement letter
Week 4–5
Reasoning and the memorandum
IRAC analyses · a full legal memorandum
Week 6–9
Contract drafting
Definitions · boilerplate · an NDA redline · a liability regime
Week 10–11
Corporate, employment, data
Resolutions · power of attorney · consent form · regulator letter
Week 12–13
Disputes, opinions, translation
Arbitration clause · statement of claim · legal opinion
Week 14
Professional English
A CV and cover letter in English

8.

HOW YOU ARE GRADED
Assessment
20
20
20
40
points
points
points
points
Ten in-class
assignments
Midterm 1 — Week 7
Midterm 2 — Week 14
Final examination
Weeks 2–6 and 8–12. Two points
An advice email and an IRAC legal
A memorandum extract and a
Terminology, correspondence,
each. Drafted in the practical
position on Kazakhstani facts.
contract clause set with redline
analysis, contract drafting and
commentary.
review.
session.
An absence from a practical session is a zero for that week's assignment. There are ten of them.

9.

GROUND RULES
How this class runs
Attendance
Communication
70 % minimum. But the harder rule is that assignments are
The Telegram group is the channel. Questions asked elsewhere may
produced in class.
not reach me.
Format and deadlines
Artificial intelligence
Work outside the required format, or late, is not accepted. That is
Permitted for preparation and self-review — and I will show you
the profession's rule.
how. Not in timed in-class work.
Group work
Lateness
Everyone is graded individually and must be able to answer orally
More than ten minutes and I may not let you in. A lawyer late to a
for the whole task.
client call has already lost something.
Nothing you draft this semester is artificial. If you can do it by Week 14, you can do it on your first day.

10.

LECTURE 2
Legal families, sources of law
and register
The only theoretical lecture in this course. Four ideas you will use every week afterwards.

11.

IDEA 1
Legal English is three languages, not one
1
2
3
Statutory
Judicial
Transactional
Codes, statutes, regulations
Judgments, awards, pleadings
Contracts, letters, memoranda, opinions
Impersonal, general, no addressee. “A
Narrative and argumentative. Heavy on
Addressed to named parties. Forward-
person who…”
authority and reasoning.
looking. Obligation-driven.
This course lives almost entirely in the third one — which is also the one that is least taught.

12.

IDEA 2
Common law and civil law
Common law
Civil law — including Kazakhstan
Primary source
Judicial decisions structured by precedent
The code — the starting point and the finishing point
Method
Inductive: from decided cases to the rule
Deductive: from the text of the code to the case
Judgments
Long, discursive, with dissents
Short, formal, syllogistic
Contracts
Long and self-contained — they try to displace the
background law
A Kazakhstani contract can be short. A foreign counterparty will not believe it is complete.
Shorter — the code supplies what the contract omits

13.

IDEA 2 CONTINUED
Where Kazakhstan actually sits
1
2
3
A civil-law jurisdiction
Private law with Soviet inheritance and, through the CIS model Civil Code, German and Dutch influence.
Drafting in the common-law style
Almost every cross-border contract you touch will be drafted the way international commerce drafts — long, self-contained, English.
A common-law island
The AIFC applies acts based on English law, with its own court and arbitration centre — inside Kazakhstan.
You are not choosing between two traditions. You are the translator between them — and that means legal
translation, not linguistic translation.

14.

IDEA 3
Naming Kazakhstani sources of law in English
Кодекс
Code
Article 393(1) of the Civil Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Закон
Law
the Law of the RK “On …” No. …, dated … — state the version in force
Подзаконный акт
Subordinate legislation
government resolution · ministerial order
Нормативное постановление ВС
Normative resolution of the Supreme Court
Нормативный правовой акт
Normative legal act
a term of art: keep it and gloss it once
Разъяснение / письмо органа
Clarification or letter of a state body
say expressly that it is not binding law
binding guidance of general application — no common-law
equivalent
Never write “according to Kazakhstani legislation”. Write the act, the article and the paragraph — or say honestly
that you have not yet found it.

15.

IDEA 4
Seven habits that make legal writing unreadable
1
Nominalisation
“effect the making of a determination”
4
Archaisms
hereinafter · aforesaid · witnesseth
7
Defined terms adrift
defined and never used, used and never defined
2
Passive by default
“notice shall be given” — by whom?
5
Subject far from verb
the condition buried mid-sentence
3
Couplets and triplets
null and void · terms and conditions
6
Stacked negatives
“shall not be entitled to fail to deliver”
None of this is about elegance. Every one of these habits hides who has to do what, by
when.

16.

THE DRILL YOU WILL DO IN PRACTICAL 2
Before and after
BEFORE
“In the event that the Supplier is in breach of any of its obligations hereunder, the making of a determination as to the
appropriate remedy shall be undertaken by the Customer, and notification thereof shall be provided to the Supplier within
a reasonable period of time.”
AFTER
“If the Supplier breaches this Agreement, the Customer will decide which remedy to pursue and will notify the
Supplier of that decision within 10 Business Days.”
Forty-one words become twenty-six — and “a reasonable period of time”, which a judge would have had to decide two years later, becomes something
the parties decided themselves.

17.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Today's practical sessions
PRACTICAL 1
PRACTICAL 1
Diagnostic · 20 minutes
Term mapping · in pairs
A 150-word reply to a foreign client. Not graded. Sealed today and
Twelve Kazakhstani legal concepts. What you would call each in
returned to you in Week 14, so you can see exactly how far you
English — and what you would have to tell the reader so they do not
have moved.
misunderstand it.
PRACTICAL 2
PRACTICAL 2
Plain-English drill
Your infrastructure
Three real clauses. Rewrite each so a business person can follow it,
The term bank and the drafting portfolio: how they are named,
without changing its legal effect.
what goes in, and why they matter in Week 14.

18.

BEFORE WEEK 2
Three things to do
1
Join the course Telegram group.
2
Open your term bank and enter the twelve terms from today, with the trap for each.
3
Get familiarized with the Course Syllabus that will be uploaded shortly
Next week: the legal email — and the first two points on the board.