ad eugrus:
(…) As an Eastern European lawyer I would add, that translators are normally not allowed to do actual translations of contracts. (…)
This must be a peculiarity of the Russian market. I have been working for American, Austrian, German lawyers for more than a decade and I personally know a lot of other translators who are not lawyers themselves and who translate legal texts. Actually, in some cases I proofread translations done by lawyers. Most of them know the legal terms of course but this does not automatically qualify them for the work of translators. Besides, in Western countries we have certified translators (I’m afraid I don’t know what the situation is like in Russia in this respect) and if the worst comes to the worst and contract parties take legal action against each other the court will request certified translations of contracts etc. and these cannot be provided by a lawyer (unless, of course, he is also a certified translator).
(…) As for proofreading, quality standards in international legal firms normally require it to be done by native speakers. (…)
I’d say yes and no. The reason why I proofread a lot of legal texts written by native speakers of English is that there is a risk of them having misunderstood the German source text and misinterpreting a legal term may cause much more harm than a grammatical mistake or a not so elegant wording. There is no doubt whatsoever that their level of English is higher than mine but misinterpretations of German legal terms or complicated sentence structures are more common than one might think and my job is to make sure there aren’t any errors of this kind in the translations. When a client is more concerned about the style he normally hires a native speaker of English to do the proofreading, if he worries that the translator has misunderstood the German source text, it is mostly Austrians he wants to check the translation.
I always contact the translator of course if I think that there is a mistake and we talk about it. I don’t just correct the text. (By the way, my translations are also checked by colleagues). The Austrian legal term “Bestandsverträge” for example has been translated incorrectly by native speakers of English in about 80 % of the texts I have proofread. And since sometimes texts lack enough context to verify the exact meaning of a term, I can readily understand why this happens. In most cases the translators interpret “Bestand” here as “inventory”, which however is completely wrong. It is this kind of things I am checking.
I guess the best way to ensure a high-quality outcome is to have an experienced translator working in his mother tongue and closely cooperating with the client when it comes to clarifying any doubts that may arise.
In any case you seem to have an excellent professional background, being a lawyer and obviously having a very good command of German. Just the kind of experts the international market is looking for I guess.
P.S. I am working on a large legal translation right now (into German) 