Analysis of authentic legal negotiation: Implications for teaching contract negotiation to undergraduate law students

This paper reports a research study that analysed legal negotiation discourse in response to perceived deficiencies in using textbooks for teaching legal English writing to undergraduate law students in Turkey. As key collaborators, two commercial law firms in Istanbul each provided authentic negotiation data for two different commercial contracts, including emails, email attachments and different amended versions of the contracts under negotiation in English with European counterparts. Micro and macro text analysis was performed on the data sets and lawyers from the participating law firms were interviewed to discuss discursive features identified in the textual analysis. The duality of this analytical approach proves valuable in providing both description of the lexico-grammatical features and rhetorical structures of the negotiation discourse process and an understanding of the professional practices that influence and shape the negotiations. Findings from this study provide a comprehensive (intertextually and interdiscursively oriented) ontology of legal negotiation discourse. These findings also make a meaningful contribution to English for Legal Purposes (ELP) pedagogy and the development of teaching materials that better prepare undergraduate law students for realities and complexities of negotiating commercial contracts in English.