The programme will also assist professionals in carrying out their activities in foreign trade or dealing with multinational companies. The university is offering this course as a way of improving attorneys´ training as well as providing developing their practices in Spain and Latin-America.

This course is also suitable for Spanish speaking legal professionals that wish to improve their legal English level in an efficient, interactive and pleasant way. The need to train legal professionals to be proficient in English has increased because of the growing relevance that the English language is acquiring in different areas of legal practice, both at the level of international commerce, and because of the growth of foreign residents in Spain. In this context, English has become the new lingua franca. This means generally, but especially in certain tourist areas, that the professional who wants to be efficient and competitive must have a level of technical English (legal English) sufficient enough to enable them to interpret written documents and communicate with non-national clients at the same level as colleagues in other territories in the European Union.

The scope of this course is to provide legal professionals with a program which will provide them with an accurate knowledge of the English language as applied to our institutions and regulations. The aim is to enable them to offer their clients the highest possible level of linguistic skills, in addition to their professional qualifications, when assisting nationals and non-nationals whose rights are, or might be violated. The program will also assist professionals in carrying out their activities in foreign trade or dealing with multinational companies.

Therefore, throughout the course there will be a strong emphasis on the practical application of knowledge. In this context, the lessons will take a ‘case-study’ teaching approach following the case law method that is generally used in British and North American law studies

Legal English will be studied along with specific teaching on the different legal subjects considered. This will allow the participants the possibility of updating their knowledge on the applicable law and will offer them an insight into the current issues in their different fields of practice, especially in Private Law; both international and national. However, the program only considers some of the institutions and subjects within Spanish Law, some in more depth than others. The aim is to provide a general perspective, though the program offers a more detailed vision of those topics that have been considered to be of greater relevance. Clearly the program can not attempt to include all the fields of Spanish Law, but it will offer sufficient linguistic skills in the most important topics. We believe that these topics will contribute to the training of a lawyer who is used to dealing with English speaking clients.

This program has been prepared with both classroom sessions and on-line learning in mind. This means that each subject will make the most of the time available. However, special emphasis will be placed on those topics with greater relevance to participants, or greater legal controversy. In parallel, some topics may be the subject of more in-depth study using the UNIA Virtual Campus – this digital platform will play a crucial role during this course. 

Each week the students enrolled on the blended learning mode will carry out an on-line project identified by the teacher during the in-class session of that week. This project will have a practical dimension, and though it may also focus on specific case law, it may deal with those subjects that have been considered in the in-class session or in the materials that each teacher will provide through the UNIA Virtual Campus.

The students enrolled on the fully on-line mode will also have to do the same weekly assignments as the students on the blended course. These tasks will be successively uploaded in the windows corresponding to each weekly session and, unless stated otherwise in the instructions, instructions; these will always be mandatory. Alongside this, the students will have to follow the sessions that will be transmitted interactively, in order to allow them to take part in every section of the course. This Diploma Course is co-organized by the bar association of Lucena (Spain), and thanks to the sponsorship of the Colegio Notarial de Andalucía and the Spanish Genaral Council of the Judiciary (Consejo General del Poder Judicial).