Attorney Jakub L. Szypulka
Attorney Jakub L. Szypulka was born in Poland and moved to Germany with his family when he was young. His background combines legal work, software development and foreign languages.
He is an attorney admitted to practise in Germany and assists his clients with all questions of German law.
He is also a full-stack software developer and uses these skills to organise the firm’s work particularly efficiently.
Foreign languages have fascinated him since childhood. He can communicate in speech and writing in German, Polish, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic and the Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi dialects) and Chinese (Mandarin, HSK4).
Legal background
Attorney Jakub L. Szypulka studied law at Heidelberg University.
His time at university included numerous stays abroad, which he used to learn languages.
He held a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
He completed his legal traineeship at Dortmund Regional Court.
Since then, he has worked in citizenship and residence law and leads a team of experienced attorneys. He has handled a wide variety of situations, from new applications and ongoing proceedings to court actions and appeals.
Foreign languages
Polish is one of his two native languages.
Throughout all 13 years of his schooling in Germany, he attended the Polish school at the Polish consulate in Cologne one or two afternoons a week.
During his school years, he spent 2008–2009 at a high school in the US state of Missouri.
His work as a software developer is generally conducted entirely in English, even when everyone involved is German.
During his university studies, he spent a year on the Erasmus programme at Université Toulouse 1 Capitole in southern France.
The courses there were taught in French, and he successfully completed a programme in EU law.
After his time in France, he undertook a legal internship with a Mexican criminal defence attorney in Pachuca and Tulancingo, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo.
There, he became particularly familiar with Spanish legal terminology.
Through the student organisation AIESEC, he spent several months in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in central Russia.
Knowing Polish as a native language was helpful because he was already familiar with a Slavic language. Russian was his first language with a non-Latin alphabet.
For many years, he has advised clients from Eastern Europe in Russian. They currently include many people from Ukraine.
Around the start of the refugee crisis in 2015, he spent a year in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. He initially attended courses at the local branch of the Sorbonne University in Paris, then moved to the Arabic-speaking Cairo University for the second semester.
Throughout his stay, he took very intensive language courses. He first learned the Egyptian dialect and later Modern Standard Arabic, with a particular focus on the language of mass media such as television.
On returning to Germany, he began volunteering as an interpreter the very next day. He interpreted mainly in refugee accommodation, but also occasionally for public authorities, medical facilities and the police.
For many years, he has advised numerous Arabic-speaking clients who speak a wide variety of Arabic dialects. He provides advice in Arabic, both in writing and over the phone.
Between his first and second state examinations in law, he spent six months in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, near Shanghai.
Beforehand, he had spent around six months studying the language independently.
He attended various language courses there and concluded his studies by successfully obtaining the HSK4 language certificate.