As recently as a decade ago, it would have been pretty easy to count the number of countries where top UK law firms had set up international offices. Now, as their client base becomes ever-more global and competition for work at home intensifies, this is no longer the case.

If school-level French, Spanish or German could ever have got you through your dealings with international counterparts, they certainly can't now as clients look further afield to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

So it is a little surprising that research this week highlights a lack of language skills among the in-house legal teams of FTSE 250 companies, showing quite a lag even as businesses try to make deep inroads into developing markets. 

Of nearly 3,000 counsel working for the UK operations of the FTSE 250, just less than a quarter speak another language to business level. And even though a decent 42% of those linguists speak more than one other language, European languages still dominate.

Despite Asia's unarguable economic importance, only a smattering of in-house teams at these big companies have relevant language skills, with just 12 people speaking Cantonese, 10 Japanese and nine Mandarin. Arabic is not represented at all.

Because of the particularly global nature of their business, banks and energy giants fare best linguistically, with in-house teams at Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland each speaking more than 15 languages (including one impressive RBS polyglot speaking eight languages).

But given the cross-border nature of many other companies, the broader shortage of language skills is troubling. And you would be hard pushed to say that their private practice counterparts are much better: because of the dominance of English as the business lingua franca, there has not been a real drive by Anglo-Saxon law firms to hire linguists.

Adding to the sense of complacency – some might say arrogance – is the increasing use of English law to govern international deals. 

But given the ever-more international nature of big deals, as our front page this week highlights, this attitude appears increasingly outdated and not a little lazy. British and US law firms teamed up with leading global independents for several Q3 mega-mergers.

So while big UK and US law firms will continue to lean on local lawyers for legal support in niche markets, they should not ignore the cultural understanding that only comes from speaking with colleagues, clients and suppliers in their mother tongues.

Aside from losing out work to local specialists, their lack of linguists means these firms are missing out on the full richness of working around the world, no matter how far afield they plant their flags.