Professional Discourse Definition

Method
Why Professional Discourse among Lawyers?
“Professional discourse plays a great role in modern society. It lies at the heart of business world and the state” – states Gunnarson (2009:3) clearly at the beginning of her book Professional Discourse. In other words, professional discourse within organisations, in both verbal and non-verbal forms, plays a pivotal role in the creation of professional practices, thus contributes to the reproduction as well as the reshaping of these practices (Gunnarson, 2009).
Significantly, “the conditions for professional discourse have been influenced by a series of changes which have taken place in recent decades” (Gunnarson, 2009:239), including technological advances and globalisation, making great affects

(Gunnarson, 2009). These benefits are, undeniably, positively affecting the discourse of lawyers. They, for example, now can talk with their clients within a mouse-click, with the presenter sharing information over the Internet through visuals and the phone. The increasing use of word-processing, presentation, database, etc. has also prompted the legal professionals in general, and the discourse of lawyers in particular, to become more proficient than ever.
In the field of legal and bureaucratic domain, in another sense, it can be observed that the expansion of technology has changed the way people communicate, e.g. contacts between governmental agencies and citizens are handled by remote services, 24/7 call centres, emails, etc. (Gunnarson, 2009). Besides, the expanded use of the Internet has made it easier to establish global contacts, to access to a worldwide source of articles and papers, to study from distance, and to cooperate with scholars or other figures around the world (Gunnarson, 2009). Moreover, the revolution of technology and technological advances, including closed legal communities, now allows cooperate clients “share and syndicate legal advices and documents online to tackle collective regulatory and compliance problems” (Rose,

This action, in turn, contributes to the competence of communication activities for lawyer professions, both in language comprehension and related professional legal discourse. Also, globalisation, in association with technological advances, allows lawyers, scholars, etc. to access to wider sources of documents, books, articles, etc. written in English or other widely used languages (Gunnarson, 2009:239), thus provides them with more knowledge gained from different perspectives from all over the