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There are multiple aspects of electronically-mediated communication that influence and have strong implications for legal practice. This book focuses on three major aspects of mediated communication through social media. Section 1 examines social media and the legal community. It explores how this has influenced professional legal discourse and practice, contributing to the popularity of internet-based legal research, counselling and assistance through online services offering explanations of law, preparing documents, providing evidence, and even encouraging electronically mediated alternative dispute resolution. Section 2 looks at the use of social media for client empowerment. It examines how it has taken legal practice from a formal and distinct business to one that is publicly informative and accessible. Section 3 discusses the way forward, exploring opportunities and challenges. Based on cases from legal practice in diverse jurisdictions, the book highlights key issues as well as implications for legal practitioners on the one hand, and clients on the other. The book will be a valuable reference for international scholars in law and other socio-legal studies, discourse analysis, and practitioners in legal and alternative dispute resolution contexts.

This volume provides descriptive and interpretive insights into the 'living' usage of language and other semiotic modes in building and performing the law across academic, professional and institutional contexts, where issues arise from the meaning and function of legal texts, discourse and genre in constituting and enabling conventions, albeit dynamically, and account for the socially and (inter)culturally influenced forms of discursive actions and practices. The twenty contributions included here weave significant contexts and situations for legal discourse and practice into a tight thread, and justify selected topic areas through a variety of approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and procedures. As such, this publication is multidimensional and multiperspectival in its design and implementation of key issues confronting discursive actions and practices of the law, and provides an invaluable resource for academics in a wider range of disciplines, including linguistics, applied linguistics and communication studies. It will also be of interest to students of interdisciplinary discourse analysis.

Over recent decades, legal language and its representation of social action, social actors and social practices have provided systematic insights into the meaning and function of text, discourse or talk realised in academic, professional and institutional sites of communication, and generated a variety of data for analysis, method and theory. Constructing Legal Discourses and Social Practices, the first issue of the Legal Discourse and Communication international series, looks descriptively and interpretatively at the realised forms of legal discourse and how these are framed and organised by social practices within distinctive sites of legal communication. The four main parts of the book provide a broad coverage of key issues and perspectives arising from a variety of genres (spoken, as well as written) employed in institutional, professional and organisational communication of the law, and bring into focus recent research where language and law play out in the real world. This invaluable book is multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival in its design and implementation, and will be an essential reference for those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and for postgraduate students.

This book provides insights into the ways in which legal professionals participate in their day-to-day activities, and critically focuses on how language is used and exploited in everyday professional discourse. It is organised into two parts dealing with topic areas of legal discourse (written and spoken) relevant to professional practice and communication. The innovative research landscape offered by this book covers diverse and complex features of legal discourse construction where social.