Legal specialists telling their stories on the internet: A comparative analysis of professional self-portrayals on German and Italian law firm websites

The paper builds on the results of previous comparative studies on the pragmatic features of advertisements for legal jobs in German, Danish and Italian, revealing a substantial homogeneity of communicative functions across cultures (with ads gradually evolving into instruments of employer branding) as well as culture-specific dimensions with regard to shared professional values and attitudes in the different national contexts. The observation of legal job ads embedded in law firm websites suggests that remediation is likely to have considerable impacts on the way legal specialists present themselves and their professional services. With a view to a comparison of epistemic cultures, the paper focuses on the results of a case study comparing self-presentation practices in German and Italian boutique law firm websites. Through a text pragmatic analysis, centered on the website sections devoted to the presentation of the staff, we attempt to investigate how professional image is constructed and communicated in the examined legal cultures. The study was specifically aimed at assessing — in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective — the communicative salience of professional biographies (as new emerging digital subgenre of self-presentation vs. more traditional formats like CV), the presence of professional stereotyping (auto, hetero- and meta-stereotypes disclosing specific cultural standards) and the impact of the digital medium (website as multimodal communication platform) on the personal marketing of legal specialists promoting their expertise and services on the web.