Legal English: Vocabulary by Practice Area and a Roadmap for Practitioners

You read English contracts every week and understand almost everything, until you hit a phrase like prima facie or the parties hereto shall indemnify and hold harmless and have to stop and look it up. In a meeting with a foreign partner, or listening to an arbitration hearing, the speaking speed outruns the speed at which you translate in your head, and you lose the entire next sentence.

The problem isn't that your English is weak. Legal English uses its own layer of vocabulary: Latin roots, set phrases hundreds of years old, and some concepts that don't exist in Vietnam's legal system. This article sorts vocabulary by the exact field you encounter in your work, with standard pronunciation and real example sentences rather than textbook sample sentences. The last section covers how to study so the words stay in your head, instead of studying just to forget them a week later.

• Where legal English differs from everyday English
• Legal vocabulary by field
• Parties and courts
• Civil law and contracts
• Criminal law
• Corporate and economic law
• Dispute resolution and arbitration
• Latin still lives on in contracts
• The gap between common law and civil law
• How to study to remember, instead of studying to forget
• Common mistakes
• A roadmap for legal practitioners
• Frequently asked questions

Where legal English differs from everyday English

Legal English adds three extra layers of difficulty on top of the English you already know. The first layer is Latin and Old French roots: many legal terms keep the original Latin phrase (prima facie, bona fide) or medieval French (estoppel, force majeure), and the pronunciation doesn't follow ordinary English pronunciation rules.

The second layer is false friends: words that look familiar but mean something entirely different in a legal context. Consideration in everyday life means thoughtfulness; in a contract it's the mandatory condition for the contract to be valid. Award in everyday life means a prize; in arbitration it's a ruling. Translate by the familiar meaning, and you misread the whole sentence.

The third layer is style: long sentences, many subordinate clauses, and a tendency to repeat the subject instead of using pronouns to avoid ambiguity. Listening live, in a hearing or a call with a partner, the speaking speed doesn't slow down just because the content is hard, and this is exactly where good reading comprehension can still fail to keep up when listening.

Legal vocabulary by field

Most legal vocabulary lists are arranged alphabetically, from A to Z, so you have to read through the whole thing before you know where the word you need sits. That approach is meaningless for a real user, because in your work you don't encounter words alphabetically — you encounter them by the matter at hand: reading a contract, you need terms about obligations and compensation; sitting in a criminal trial, you need criminal procedure terms; reviewing an M&A deal, you need corporate terms. The seven groups below are arranged exactly the way you encounter these words in real work, not in alphabetical order.

Parties and courts

This is the foundational layer of vocabulary: who's involved in a case, and where the court sits, under what jurisdiction. Get a firm grip on this group first, because almost every procedural document reuses these words.

Civil law and contracts

The group of words you'll encounter most if your work involves drafting or reviewing contracts, even if you don't work in a legal department.

Criminal law

Less common in day-to-day corporate work, but it turns up thick and fast in English-language legal news, true-crime documentaries, and court reports.

Corporate and economic law

The vocabulary of M&A deals, compliance work, and corporate finance.

Dispute resolution and arbitration

Vocabulary specific to international commercial arbitration, where English is practically the default language of both the case file and the hearing.

Latin still lives on in contracts

The nine phrases below aren't English, but they show up in almost every commercial contract you'll read. Their spelling makes the meaning easy to guess; their pronunciation doesn't, since they keep their original sounds. Two of them, force majeure and estoppel, come from French rather than Latin, but they're grouped here because they share the same problem: written one way, read another.

The gap between common law and civil law

Vietnam follows the civil law system: rules are written into codes. England, the US, Singapore follow common law: most rules come from case law, meaning prior judgments. The six terms below describe how the common law machinery runs, and Vietnamese has no exact equivalent for most of them. The meaning column is just a starting point for further lookup, not a final translation.

How to study to remember, not to study to forget

Read a list of seventy-odd words once and you'll remember a few dozen, and a week later you'll have forgotten nearly all of them. That's not because you're bad at studying — it's because reading and listening use two different memory mechanisms. Reading lets you recognize a word when you meet it again on paper. Listening, getting it wrong, then correcting yourself — that's what forces the brain to attach the word to its real sound, the kind of memory you need when you're sitting in a meeting or a hearing.

Take indemnify and hold harmless, a phrase that's almost mandatory in commercial contracts. Read on paper, you can clearly see three separate words. Heard in natural speech, a native speaker links the sounds almost seamlessly, /ɪnˈdɛmnɪfaɪ ənd həʊld ˈhɑːmlɪs/, with "and" reduced to the point of nearly disappearing. A first-time listener easily transcribes it as "indemnify unhold harmless" or drops the word "and" altogether. Only by getting it wrong, rewinding, catching the linking sound, and correcting yourself does the word actually stick.

This is why dictation listening practice suits specialized vocabulary better than flashcards: you learn the word in the right sentence, at the real speaking speed you'll encounter out there. WELE ranks podcasts by your listening level, and the article on vocabulary in context breaks down why this approach works better than learning isolated words.

If you're not yet familiar with the phenomenon of connected speech, the article on connected speech explains it in more depth, and 5 steps to effective dictation practice is a concrete roadmap if you don't want to figure it out on your own.

Common mistakes

Damage vs. damages. The singular "damage" is harm in general, uncountable. The plural "damages" in law is monetary compensation for loss, a distinct concept rather than a simple plural. "The car suffered damage" is entirely different from "The court awarded damages."

Which sense of equity. In financial reports, equity means owner's equity. In common law, equity is a separate branch of legal principles. Context is the only way to tell them apart.

Wrong stress shifts the meaning. "Contract" stressed on the first syllable, /ˈkɒntrækt/, is the noun meaning agreement. The same word with stress on the second syllable, /kənˈtrækt/, is the verb, meaning to enter into an agreement or to shrink. Mishear the stress and you can easily mistake the word even though the vocabulary itself isn't unfamiliar.

Affidavit and deposition are not interchangeable. An affidavit is a pre-written document, signed under oath before a notary, used when the person making the statement doesn't need to appear in court. A deposition is a live question-and-answer session that's recorded, during the discovery phase. Confusing the two leads readers to misunderstand the whole procedure.

Civil doesn't mean "citizen" or "polite." "Civil law" means dân sự law, as opposed to "criminal law." But "civil" on its own usually means polite, as in "keep the conversation civil." Carrying that familiar meaning over into legal text will skew the whole sentence.

A roadmap for legal practitioners

The legal profession touches English in three layers, increasingly difficult in the order below. Vietnamese lawyers tend to stay stuck at layer one for quite a while, because with reading there's still time to look things up, while with listening no one rewinds the tape in the middle of a work session.

1. Stage one, reading contracts and case law without translating line by line. Each week take one clause from a real English-language contract, underline every verb expressing an obligation or a right — including shall, shall not, may, is entitled to, undertakes to — then rewrite that clause as exactly one sentence in Vietnamese. If you can't manage to write one sentence, it means you haven't grasped the clause's structure, not that you're short on vocabulary.
2. Stage two, being able to follow a trial hearing and a deposition. This is where almost everyone breaks down. In a deposition or an oral argument, speakers interrupt each other, leave sentences hanging mid-way, a judge cuts in with a question in the middle of an argument still in progress. Each week take a three-minute clip that has a transcript available, listen sentence by sentence and write it down, then check. The part you miss is almost always an interrupting question, not a term.
3. Stage three, drafting documents and advising foreign clients. Each week write one advisory letter in English for a situation you've actually just handled, with a section stating the risks and a section with recommendations, then turn the paper face down and say the whole thing out loud in three minutes. Clients rarely read the whole letter — they listen to you talk.

Self-study sources should come with a transcript to check against, and the closer to real case files, the better.

• Oyez (oyez.org): an archive of oral argument recordings at the US Supreme Court, with audio synced to a sentence-by-sentence transcript, including cases from the 2025 term, so once you've transcribed something you can check it right away.
• US Supreme Court transcripts (supremecourt.gov, oral argument transcripts section): free PDF files, posted the same day the oral argument takes place, clearly noting who said what.
• Wex by the Legal Information Institute (law.cornell.edu/wex): a free legal dictionary-cum-encyclopedia maintained by Cornell Law School, with each entry explaining the concept in full paragraphs, so you pick up phrasing as well.
• EDGAR from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (sec.gov, full text search section): search the full text of disclosure filings by US listed companies — look up the name of a type of agreement and you get thousands of real contracts filed as exhibits, free, without having to touch any client files.

Stage two is the decisive stage, and it only budges when you listen sentence by sentence and write it down, rather than just playing recordings to get your ear used to them. Dictation practice on exactly the kind of recordings the profession actually uses is the cheapest way to shorten it.

Frequently asked questions

Where should someone who's never studied law start with legal English?

Start with the parties and courts group, since every legal document reuses that group of words. To find out in advance where your gaps are, the vocabulary test gives you a concrete starting point instead of a guess.

Do I need to memorize all nine Latin phrases in this article?

No need to learn them all at once. Prioritize based on the documents you actually read: for contracts, bona fide, force majeure, pro rata come up more often; for litigation, prima facie and estoppel come up more often.

What's the difference between common law and civil law, in short?

Common law relies heavily on case law, meaning prior judgments carry reference value. Civil law, the system Vietnam follows, relies mainly on written codes. This article only addresses the difference in how each operates, not the specific law of either.

Can someone new to the job, not yet familiar with the terminology, start dictation practice right away?

Yes, as long as you pick the right difficulty level. Start with the listening level test, then increase the specialized content gradually.

Legal vocabulary isn't something you finish learning in a week — the seven groups above are things you'll run into again and again in real work. If you want to practice listening to these phrases at real speaking speed instead of just reading them on paper, try an episode from WELE's podcast library and transcribe exactly what you hear.

If you work in a different field, the roundup article on specialized English already has core vocabulary for many other fields too.