1st International Colloquium on Legal and Business Communication (ICLBC)

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The 1st International Colloquium on Legal and Business Communication (ICLBC) will be held online from 22 to 23 February 2025 and hosted by the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics (AALL). It is our great pleasure to welcome Professor Ursula Lutzky (Vienna University of Economics and Business) and Professor Stephen Barth (University of Houston) as next year’s keynote speakers.

Image credit: Stephen Barth

Stephen Barth, Professor of Hospitality Law and Leadership at the University of Houston and founder of HospitalityLawyer.com.

Communication and the Law: Transparency, Clarity, and Mutuality in Hospitality Contracts

In today’s complex legal landscape, effective communication is not just an asset—it’s a necessity. This keynote presentation delves into the intersection of communication and the law, emphasizing the pivotal roles of transparency, clarity, and mutuality in crafting and understanding contracts. Contracts are the cornerstone of professional relationships, yet they often rely on dense legalese that can obscure intent and breed misunderstandings. This session will explore strategies to demystify legal language, ensuring it serves its true purpose: facilitating clear, fair, and enforceable agreements.
Through real-world examples and actionable insights, attendees will learn:
●  The Power of Plain Language: How simplifying legal jargon enhances comprehension without sacrificing precision.
●  Transparency as Trust-Building: The role of openness in fostering stronger business relationships.
●  Clarity in Drafting: Techniques for reducing ambiguities that can lead to disputes.
●  Mutuality as a Foundation: Ensuring contracts reflect balanced obligations and benefits for all parties.

By bridging the gap between legal precision and human understanding, this presentation will equip participants with the tools to create contracts that are not only legally sound but also clear, equitable, and mutually beneficial. Whether you’re a lawyer, business leader, or professional navigating contractual agreements, this keynote promises to transform how you communicate within the framework of the law.

Stephen Barth earned his BA in Economics, MA in Communications and JD from Texas Tech University. He is the Founder of HospitalityLawyer.com, The Hospitality Law Conference series, the Global Travel Risk Summit Series and the co – author of the Hospitality Law Textbook. He is a professor of Hospitality Law and Leadership at the Conrad Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership, University of Houston. In his classes he focuses on communication skills and in his work he stresses the need for transparent cogent communication along with mutuality in contracts.

Image credit: Pascal Riesinger

Ursula Lutzky, Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and ABC’s Regional Vice President for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

“Nobody asked you for your political opinion, brand”
Polarization and identity in digital business communication A case-study from the transport industry

Today, businesses frequently draw on digital media when interacting with their stakeholders. Research on digital business communication, or more specifically webcare (van Noort and Willemsen 2012), has advocated a specific style of language use in online contexts and encouraged businesses to communicate with a ‘Conversational Human Voice’ (CHV, Kelleher and Miller 2006). One feature of a CHV is communicating with a sense of humour, which may have benefits, such as leading to increased user engagement. At the same time, humour may polarize and divide business’ client base, which may entail negative outcomes. This is also the case when businesses engage in corporate social advocacy (CSA) and take sides on contested issues, such as vaccination (van der Meer and Jonkman 2021). This study explores the digital communication of the Irish budget airline Ryanair, which during the COVID-19 pandemic combined these two polarizing strategies of adopting a humorous approach and taking a stance on socio-political issues in its external communication. Using a corpus linguistic methodology, it studies a 4.5-million-word corpus of posts on Twitter (now X) which were shared by and addressed to Ryanair between October 2020 and March 2023. The results show that Ryanair discussed several topics that were not immediately related to its core business, often in a humorous manner, and that its engagement with a range of (socio)political issues was not always appreciated by stakeholders. These findings are discussed with reference to Ryanair’s brand identity, as an edgy airline, and by relating its digital discourse strategy to the context of communication and its reputation as an air travel provider that is unconventional and partly brash.

Ursula Lutzky  is an Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where she teaches on the master’s in business communication. She is a linguist specializing in the study of language in business contexts. Her research focuses on external business communication, that is communication between businesses and the outside world. She mainly studies how businesses communicate through digital outlets by investigating large samples of digital data, such as blogs, microblogs, e-commerce platforms and forums. Her most recent monograph, The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets (2021, Bloomsbury), explores the linguistic and communicative features of customer service interactions on social media. She is an active member of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) and currently serves the role of ABC’s Regional Vice President for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Download the call for papers: click here