Professional chat communication of lawyers in the digital environment: cognitive strategies and pragmatic organization.

The subject of this scientific article is the professional chat communication of lawyers in a digital environment, specifically the features of the formation, use, and interpretation of cognitive strategies, as well as the specifics of the pragmatic organization of communication. It analyzes how lawyers implement professional interaction through text messaging, forums, and specialized platforms, what speech and thought mechanisms are employed for the effective transmission of legally significant information, the development of collective decisions, argumentation, and the reconciliation of positions on legal issues. Attention is given to examining ways of planning utterances, the selection of speech impact strategies depending on communicative tasks, participants, and the nature of the topics discussed. The study explores how the characteristics of the digital environment and the format of asynchronous text communication influence the pragmatic structure of dialogues, the genre diversity of messages, the specifics of virtual legal ethics, and the verbal regulation of legal activities. The methodology combines cognitive reconstruction, pragmalinguistic, and content analysis based on a corpus of over 2,300 messages from the "Lawyers Forum" and "Lawyers Community" channels (2023–2025). The goal of the research is to identify cognitive scenarios, pragmatic strategies, and semiotic means that structure legal interaction in computer-mediated communication. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the comprehensive examination of professional chat communication among lawyers in a digital environment from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. For the first time in domestic science, an analysis of the features of using digital messengers and specialized professional platforms for communication between lawyers has been conducted, revealing typical cognitive strategies for processing and transmitting information under conditions of limited time and message formats. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the pragmatic structure of messages and the communicative tasks faced by lawyers when discussing business matters, transmitting instructions, and reconciling positions in a virtual environment. The research reveals new patterns in the formation of speech acts and pragmatic tactics in the context of digital interaction, which opens up additional opportunities for optimizing professional communication within the legal community. Three models of interaction have been established—directive, navigational, and discussion—which differ in subject position and type of speech acts, as well as signs of cognitive compression, semiotic marking, and syntactic reduction.

legal discourse, cognitive scenarios, chat communication, pragmatic strategies, digital linguistics, interaction model, legal speech, legal consulting, digitalization, chat discourse