A native English proofreader’s review of law firm websites across Central and Eastern Europe
A growing number of law firms in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and across CEE now have English-language websites. After reviewing several dozen of them, the same categories of error appear on site after site: typos in navigation menus, Polish calques like “broadly understood”, missing articles, inconsistent capitalisation, sentences that follow Polish word order, double superlatives, and the unmistakable patterns of unchecked AI translation. None of these mistakes is catastrophic in isolation. Cumulatively, they signal to an English-speaking general counsel or international client that the firm’s English has not been checked by a native speaker – which raises an obvious question about the firm’s English-language legal work. A professional proofread of a typical firm website costs a fraction of the site’s build cost. The return is immediate.
A growing number of law firms in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and across CEE now have English-language websites. That’s a good thing. If you want international clients, foreign investors or a presence in rankings like Chambers or Legal 500, you need English content, and many firms have clearly invested time and money in getting it right.
The problem is that “getting it right” is harder than it looks. After reviewing several dozen English-language law firm websites across the region, I found that even well-designed, professionally built sites contain recurring English mistakes that an international reader will notice. The mistakes are rarely catastrophic. But they chip away at the image the firm is trying to project.
This article is not about naming and shaming. Every example below is real, taken from live websites, but I have left out firm names. The point is to show what kinds of errors come up most often, why they happen and how easy they are to fix.
One firm’s main navigation menu reads “Arreas of support” instead of “Areas of support”. It has been live for some time. Navigation links appear on every page of a website, so a typo there is repeated dozens or hundreds of times. Visitors see it before they read a single word of the firm’s content.
Typos in body text happen to everyone. Typos in headers, menus, page titles and buttons are different. They suggest that nobody with a native-level command of English reviewed the site before it launched.
Another firm’s article summary includes “avialible” for “available” and I have seen “bussiness” for “business”. Small things I know, but they add up.
This is the single most common issue I found. Multiple firms across Poland use the phrase “broadly understood” on their English pages. One writes that a lawyer provides services “in the area of broadly understood civil law.” Another says the firm advises on “what is broadly understood as competition law.”
The phrase is a direct translation of the Polish szeroko rozumiane, which is natural and common in Polish legal writing. In English, it sounds odd. A native speaker would write “all areas of civil law” or simply “civil law, in its broadest sense.”
This kind of error is invisible to the writer because the Polish version sounds perfectly fine. That is precisely why it needs a native eye. Other Polish calques I spotted include “effectuate a concentration” (for “complete a merger” or “obtain merger clearance”) and “provision of services linked to acquisition and regulation of rights covering lands” – a sentence that would send most English readers back to the beginning to try again.
Polish has no articles. English has two. This is one of the hardest things for Polish speakers to master, and it shows on website after website. One firm’s “About us” page includes this sentence: “Team of [Firm] Law Firm pride themselves on in-depth knowledge.” In English, this needs a “The” at the start and a singular verb: “The team prides itself.”
Another site promises clients “priceless sense of legal security” – which should be “a priceless sense.” A third describes a partner as “the specialist in litigation” when what they mean is “a specialist”.
Missing articles may seem trivial, but they create a cumulative impression. For an English reader, every missing “the” or “a” signals that the text was not written – or checked – by a native speaker. When a law firm is selling its ability to produce English-language legal documents, that signal is a problem.
Several firms are inconsistent about how they capitalise job titles on their “Team” pages. On one site, some lawyers are listed as “Attorney at law, Partner” while others appear as “advocate, partner” or “Advocate, Partner.” The inconsistency is visible because the titles appear side by side on the same page, in the same typeface. It makes the team page look as though different people prepared different entries and nobody brought them into line.
The fix is simple: pick one convention and apply it across every profile. In British English, job titles are lower case unless used as a specific form of address. But what matters more than the rule is consistency.
The same is true with the job titles themselves. Back in 2018, the Polish KRRP (National Bar Council of Attorneys-at-Law) decreed that the title of radca prawna should be attorney-at-law, rather than the previously used legal counsel or legal advisor. Not everyone appears to have read the memo as many firms still use different variations, with one using “attorneys-at-law,” “legal counsels,” AND “legal advisors” all on the same page. While foreign visitors to the site may not be aware of the Polish conventions, consistency is still key.
Some sentences on CEE law firm websites are grammatically correct but do not read like natural English. They follow Polish sentence structure and word order, producing text that a native reader will recognise as translated even if they cannot pinpoint a specific error.
Here are some real examples, lightly edited to preserve anonymity:
In English, you “service” a boiler or a car loan. You “serve” clients. This is a subtle but important distinction that comes from the Polish obsługa, which covers both meanings.
The last example combines three common issues: the unnecessary “in order to,” a missing “the” before “full range,” and the use of “consultancy” where “advice” or “counsel” would be more natural in a legal context.
Another pattern that appears across many sites is “register of entrepreneurs” – a literal translation of rejestr przedsiębiorców. In Polish legal language, przedsiębiorca covers any business entity, including companies. In English, “entrepreneur” means something quite different: it refers to a person who starts or runs a business, not to the business itself. Telling an English-speaking client that their company has been entered in the “register of entrepreneurs” sounds as though individuals, not companies, are being registered. The standard English term is “commercial register” – or, where precision is needed, “National Court Register (KRS).” It is a small point, but it appears in privacy policies, corporate law pages and client-facing articles, and to a native reader it jars every time.
One firm describes helping clients select “the most optimum form of entrepreneurship.” “Optimum” already means “the best possible,” so “most optimum” is a double superlative – like writing “most best.” The correct form is simply “the optimum form” or “the most suitable form.”
This kind of error is worth highlighting because it tends to appear in the firm’s most important marketing copy – the sentences meant to sound impressive. When the grammar stumbles at the exact point where the text is trying hardest, the effect is the opposite of what was intended.
Some of the websites I reviewed have clearly been translated using AI tools like DeepL or ChatGPT. You can tell because the English is fluent in patches but then drops into oddly formal or robotic phrasing. One site describes itself with a string of sentences that repeat “our law firm in Poland” and “our lawyers in Poland” six or seven times in a single paragraph, in the unmistakable pattern of keyword-stuffed AI output.
AI translation has improved enormously and can be a useful starting point. But the output still needs a human pass. The machine will not catch false friends, it will not fix Polish sentence structure, and it will not notice that a paragraph sounds robotic. Post-editing by a native speaker turns a reasonable draft into something that reads as though it was written in English from the start.
None of the mistakes in this article are deal-breakers on their own. A client choosing between two law firms will not reject one because of a missing article. But when a firm’s website is one of the first things a potential client sees, and when that client is an English-speaking general counsel or in-house lawyer, the cumulative effect of these errors sends a message: this firm’s attention to detail in English is not quite there.
It is worth remembering that an English-language website is a legal product. It is a document. It represents the firm’s ability to work in English. If the website reads as though it was translated and left unchecked, a potential client may wonder whether the firm’s contracts and opinions receive the same treatment.
The irony is that these problems are among the cheapest and easiest things to fix. A professional native-English proofread of a typical firm website takes a few days and costs a fraction of what the site itself cost to build. The return on that investment – in credibility, in rankings submissions, in the confidence of international clients – is immediate.
If you are a law firm with an English website, here are a few things worth checking:
Need a native British English proofread of your law firm’s English website?
