The Bar Association of the Eastern Pyrenees and the Council of the Catalan Bara have signed a accession agreement on the Catalan legal resources portal Compendium.cat. According to Ràdio Arrels, lawyers from both sides of the border met this Friday with the aim of “strengthening” relations and encourage bilingual use del català i el castellà between companies and institutions. For their part, the northern Catalan lawyers undertake to disseminate this portal of legal resources in Catalan among their associates and the Faculty of Law of the University of Perpignan.
In this sense, the initiative plans to incorporate contract drafting models into Compendium.cat, especially commercial law and company law, which could be offered to members in a bilingual Catalan-French format to be used in commercial or administrative relations between companies or institutions from the two countries. The agreement was signed by the president of the Catalan Bar Council, Joan Ramon Puig, and the dean of the Eastern Pyrenees Bar Association, Jacques Malavialle.
The announcement of the creation of the portal was made at the end of last year when eighteen Catalan and Andorran entities and institutions, under the leadership of the Catalan Bar Council and the Department of Justice, signed an agreement to promote the ‘use of Catalan in justice through the creation of a Catalan legal language resource portal. With this agreement, there are now thirty entities and institutions from Catalonia, Andorra, Valencia, the Balearic Islands and the south of France that participate in Compendium.cat.
The Compendium.cat portal is conceptually a search engine that allows you to search and find information in more than 800 language resources, including legal drafting manuals, language notes on legal terminology, legal dictionaries and teaching manuals. The portal also includes court forms from various jurisdictions, forms for arbitration and mediation, corporate forms, pleadings and other document models that are gradually being incorporated. The tool is mainly aimed at three main audiences: legal professionals (lawyers, notaries, solicitors, judges, registrars, social graduates, etc.), language professionals (proofreaders, translators, editors, interpreters) and staff of the public and private administrations that have to draft documents.