After having edited for a lawyer whose job involved looking things up on a database and then rewriting legal documents from saved templates, I became convinced that I, too, could write contracts, provided I had the correct template from which to work. After all, what is a lawyer but a linguist with the right code words?

Of course, there’s always a time to ask the experts, so we’ve sourced some experts for this issue. The three topics we cover — legal, financial and immigration — are linked by recent world news developments. Thomas Gilmartin’s piece on Brexit, for example, covers all three: the legal finer points influencing the migration of the financial sector from London.

A duo of legal experts — a linguist and a lawyer — take a look at linguistic-based immigration from a legal perspective (because this is one of those times when it’s best to ask the experts). Legal immigration is still on everyone’s minds thanks to Donald Trump, as Terena Bell points out in her article.

John Tinsley covers neural machine translation and the role it can play in the legal field, while Jeff Schmidt takes more of a bird’s-eye view of language services and global litigation.

Because some of the topics we cover are complex and because we recognize that people increasingly get their news from tweets and other short-form messages, we’ve introduced the “chat version” of articles in this issue. Ultimately, we hope these summaries will spur you to read further.