Profile

About Your Course Leader: Paul Cooper M.A., LL.B, Grad.Dip.Cont.Ed., CELTA

Paul Cooper is a lawyer and educator with over 30 years experience in professional continuing education.

His academic qualifications are in law, linguistics, and adult education, as well as teaching English to speakers of other languages. He has been admitted to the Bar and practised as a solicitor for 12 years. His MA in Legal Linguistics from the Riga Graduate School of Law was awarded with Distinction, based on a Thesis on an aspect of linguistic legislative reform within the EU.

He is an experienced oral examiner, and an accredited trainer under the UK Higher National Diploma (HND) programme. He also has considerable experience in language assessment for academic purposes.

He started practising law in 1974, and in January 1980 was appointed the first Director of Continuing Legal Education at the Leo Cussen Institute in Melbourne. In November 1984 he took the position of Head of Continuing Legal Education at the College of Law in Sydney

For 16 years he ran a group of training and publishing companies which provided training and information for the legal, accounting, insurance and finance industries throughout Australia. In this capacity he was responsible for the management of over 1,000 individual professional education programmes a year.

He is the author of a legal publication on a rare form of property ownership in the State of Victoria, in Australia. His career in professional education has covered the full spectrum from needs analysis of individuals, companies and legal practice groups, through to analysing and providing training for the entire Australian legal profession.

Since 2004 he has also been involved in training Czech civil servants, initially for accession to the EU, and more recently for participation in the Czech Presidency of the EU in 2009. Former work has also included teaching judges and prosecutors for the Judicial Academy of the Czech Republic. For many years he has been involved in teacher training, both of native-English language speakers, as well as Czech teachers of English. He has also taught civil servants within most Czech Ministries and Instrumentalities.

As well as teaching Legal English he is on the staff of the Anglophone Studies Department of Metropolitan University Prague where, amongst other things, he is responsible for the Academic Writing, and Academic Presentations programmes. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Prague College where he teaches programmes accredited by Teesside University, UK. For both tertiary institutions he supervises BA and MA student theses.

His current research interests include compiling corpora of private legal texts for better understanding of how legal language works within Europe.

Mr Cooper first visited Prague in December 1990. He holds both UK and Australian citizenship and is a permanent resident of the Czech Republic.