I was born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium. At home, we spoke French, Dutch and English. Of course, in school, the language was Dutch, the official language in Flanders. But our parents made us speak English very early on, partly because some of our family lived in the US, and also because they felt it was just plain good for our education and future.

Career

I went to law school and practiced law for about twelve years. Our firm had a fairly international clientele, so we used English almost daily. We dealt mostly with maritime law, distribution contracts, insurance issues, and general commercial matters. Most of our clients were English or American, and some Chinese.

After the Bar, I joined the insurers’ trade association, and became their director for the life insurance and labour accident divisions. I participated in all international events, thanks to my command of English.

After that, I joined Hewlett-Packard. I started out in their Brussels Office, as their legal counsel, moving on to become sales administration manager. That included contract management. That’s where I gained my experience in intellectual property law, US export restrictions, customs legislation and ICT law. I moved on to Geneva, the European headquarters, for a function in the trade regulatory area (export controls, customs, country of origin issues, dangerous goods, etc.). After a few years, I moved on to Palo Alto, California, for a similar function on a worldwide level. I came back to Brussels after three years, to take up the function of Finance Manager of HP Belgium.

I was then asked to become the CFO at Proximus, the leading mobile phone operator in Belgium. I move to Worldcom after some years, where I took up the CFO job again.

When Worldcom applied for Chapter 11 protection in the US, I decided I’d had it with big companies, quit, and set up my own consulting firm. That was in 2005. I have been working for a variety of small companies since then, in all sorts of sectors, in financial functions most of the time. Since they were small enterprises, I usually acted as in-house counsel as well.

Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of M&A work, both on the legal side and the finance side of things, and did four major ERP implementations.

Language skills

All this means that I’ve worked in English-speaking professional environments for almost thirty years. I lived in the US for three years. I consider myself a native speaker. I’ve even written a novel (“A Legal Eagle in the Soup”) under the pen name Larry Santers. Check me out on www.larrysanters.com.

So when mobility became a problem for me two years ago, I thought about what I could do from home. I came to the conclusion that I could best combine my—even if I say so myself—unusual language skills, with my thorough familiarity with the fields of law and finance, and offer translation services.

I can assist my customers with almost any type of document in the legal field (contracts, legal briefs, court sentences, board meeting minutes, deeds, etc.) in any combination of English, French and Dutch.

In the area of finance, I can help with documents of a rather operational type (e.g. accounting, charts of accounts, ERP implementations, etc), or more corporate finance oriented types of documents (KIIDs, financial statements, brochures, IPO documentation etc.).

I also do successive translations in these areas, and home language training courses in English, French and Dutch.

Anyway, I hope to hear from you soon!



Note

By the way, people sometimes think there is a difference between Flemish, as spoken in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium), and Dutch, the language of the Netherlands. This is wrong: there are no differences at all between Flemish and Dutch. Not in the grammar, not in the syntax, not in the vocabulary. Any differences that exist are limited to regional accents and regional expressions, and are much fewer than those between the English spoken in England and the English used in the United States.