How to Turn Language Barriers Into Your Biggest Competitive Advantage

Welcome back to The Legal Intake Experts podcast! For more than a decade, Answering Legal has helped growing law firms ensure they never miss a chance to connect with new leads. Now, we’re pulling back the curtain to share our best strategies for strengthening your intake process and turning more callers into clients.

In our ninth episode, hosts Nick Werker and Tony Prieto discuss the significant challenges and opportunities for law firms in overcoming language barriers. The conversation touches on the importance of serving diverse communities and how speaking clients' native languages can enhance trust and business outcomes. Nick and Tony share personal anecdotes and practical solutions, including live translation services and bilingual receptionists, offered by Answering Legal.

Check out the episode below. You can also enjoy it on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Legal Intake Experts is part of the Answering Legal podcast network. Interested in learning more about Answering Legal? Click here to learn more about 400 minute free trial!

Check out the previous episode of The Legal Intake Experts here!

This podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at [email protected].

Episode Transcript:

Nick Werker (Co-Host): We are back once again here on The Legal Intake Experts podcast. I don't know where that came from. I just started yelling we are back at the beginning of all these episodes.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Now you have to do this for every episode.

Nick: I have to now. Uh we are presented by Answering Legal. I am joined as always by Tony Prito. Tony, how are you?

Tony: I'm excited. It's the first episode of 2026 and uh you know excited to dive into the new year and into our new topic.

Nick: Time is flying. It's 2026. You know, I don't know why, but every New Year's and this is not the segment that we had planned, but every New Year's I think of the same thing. For whatever reason, when I was a kid and it turned 2000, the year 2000, people were wearing like the 2000 glasses and it's 2-0-0-0-0. That was too many zeros. Uh, I don't know why, but I always think like 2000. And then I reconcile that memory with the fact that it's now 2026 and I cannot believe that we are here.

Tony: Well, it's 2-0-2 and then the I will be the six. You know.

Nick: I don't like it. Not as not as fun as three zeros.

Tony: I mean, you can't you're you're only going to live most human beings, I would say, only live through one millennium turn if they're lucky. So, we got to we got to go through one.

Nick: That is cool. And I didn't have the anxiety about Y2K because I was too young to understand what everybody was talking about. And I don't think my parents were even cognizant of what that was. We were just like, "Hell yeah, 2000. That's cool."

Tony: Y2K never hurt a potato chip distributor.

Nick: You know, that's right. Uh, wise potato chips did put me halfway through college. It's one of my favorite uh jokes that I have about my own life. So, this is the segment that we had planned. Tony, how many languages do you speak?

Tony: This is a funny question. Um, my first word was in Spanish. Papa, which is not father, that's papa. Papa is potato. I was just like begging for more food.

Nick: No chance.

Tony: Yeah. So, so my my first they my dad always says they couldn't shovel the baby food in my mouth fast enough. So, I just started yelling papa papa, you know, calling for more food. But again, papa is father. So, it's not dad. My first word was not dad, but it was in Spanish. My first language was Spanish. Then I went to uh a very American elementary school and all the Spanish slipped from my young brain and I had to relearn it. So, technically I speak two. Uh I read a good bit of French, but I would never call myself fluent in that. And I did try to learn the Arabic alphabet and totally failed.

Nick: I very much respect the way that you explained French because so if anybody knows the lore of Nick Werker, the marketing dude guy uh person here at Answering Legal, they would know that I uh very affectionately took German classes from the age of 13 to when I finished college and then beyond. So, a long time. Um, German. I took college level French in high school. And then when I got into college, uh, I had some trouble. And one of the things that I leaned into was the fact that I was so, uh, I had a proclivity toward languages. So, I dropped the French because Tony described it so well. I cannot speak or understand spoken French, but I can read it because the letters make sense, but the pronunciation does not. But I took Russian 101 at Binghamton University. I would say I speak like 68% German these days. I can read like 18% Frenc. Which is not enough to uh to get me around in you know.

Tony: Yeah, I respect you taking language classes in college. Uh one of the quirks of where I went to school was there were no classes on Fridays except science labs and language classes. And so even if I had wanted to take a language class, the idea of waking up on a Friday and going to class and being one of the very few people actually going to class turned me off of it.

Nick: Fun fact about me is I think it it wasn't entirely that we didn't have classes on Fridays, but the bulk of the classes were like Monday, Wednesday, and then Tuesday, Thursday. Thursday. Sure. Yeah. And then Friday would be a lab because I was like an econ major at one point or it would be some sort of like seminar, but it was it was few and far between. But I did take a conversational German class with the wonderful wonderful professor who was he was very uh strict and demanding, but he ran the German department. Oh, he was a great man. Very very like particular though. And so we would do conversational German. And anyone who knows who J. Cole is, before J. Cole was really hugely popular, he had had his uh like first album.

Tony: And he was platinum with no features.

Nick: Yes. Very good. I like that. Um he was to perform at the student union at Binghamton. The night that he was to perform was a Friday night and I had my conversational German class late Friday night from like 7:30 to 8:30, something like that. And I remember petitioning the two teachers who were from Germany. They were doing some sort of like exchange teaching program in order to get more credits. And we were like, "You guys don't understand. We got to go see J. Cole. We're going to be late." And they wouldn't let us go on a Friday night. And all I can think of right now that you said Friday classes is the time that they wouldn't let me leave conversational German.

Tony: That's crazy because I've never been to Germany, but the one thing I take away is that they love to party. They got nightclubs. They're very much… disco was huge in Germany. So that's very funny that they decided no, these Americans don't get to party like we do.

Nick: Anyway, I think what we have gathered here is that speaking another language is difficult. And I want to discuss that law firms can overcome language barriers and connect with a wider pool of clients. Because if I were to try to speak another language right now, I cannot.

Tony: Yeah. The languages that Nick has are very much not ones that are spoken very widely in the United States. Uh in Brighton Beach, maybe if you're a uh if you're an attorney in a certain part of Brooklyn, you could use Russian. Uh if you're an attorney in a certain part of the Midwest where they still speak a lot of German. The thing is that people from those backgrounds also speak English. And even if they're immigrants, they often teach English in those schools. I'm lucky with Spanish in that I'm able to speak Spanish with a lot of people who don't speak English or whose English is not so strong that they're willing to communicate in that language with a stranger, right? It can be very… I mean, as you can imagine, if you've ever tried to speak a language that you don't know very well, it could be very nerve-wracking to try to do that with a complete stranger. Here's the thing is that with Spanish specifically, and it's not just Spanish, but Spanish is the second largest language spoken in the United States, you are legitimately missing out on a decent amount of new client opportunities if you can't at the very least handle uh Spanish speaking clients as they come in. Obviously, there are um certain… there's obviously immigration law where if you don't have Spanish, what are you doing? But like we can skip over that. That's the obvious one. In any form of, you know, if you've ever been to a local uh Mexican restaurant, this is a fun fact, is that many of the people who work there are not actually Mexican. It's that Mexican food is the most palatable sort of uh central and southern American food that you can serve to Americans because Mexican food has become very much an Americanized product. And so often times if you go to a Mexican restaurant, a lot of the people who work there are from Central America and places like that. My point is that it's not that those people need attorneys as well. And you know, their English could be great, but they might be more comfortable discussing complex legal topics in Spanish. And you need to be able to handle you need to be able to accommodate that.

Nick: Here's my my initial problem with um law firms who don't cater to their local community. Being a lawyer and a law firm owner largely is a uh a community engagement. I'm a big believer in community. I like to participate in my community. I like to like donate and fundraise and show up for things like that. Personally I'm not able to abandon that idea. And also, one of the major problems that I have or that I've spoken to law firm owners about is they will do one of two things. They will say, "I know enough Spanish to like get by and and communicate with my clients." Um, and then they'll be the only person who can speak Spanish and communicate with their clients. Their staff may not be able to do that, and that's okay. The other thing is if the law firm owner is not able to communicate in Spanish and abandons the idea and the law firm owner is not able to communicate in Spanish and only has one person in their organization or business that can communicate in Spanish. So, I just wanted to point out that there's like so many scenarios where you kind of try to make the excuse and skate by without having the proper client care at the forefront of your mind in order to really help your local community.

Tony: Yeah. I mean, I'm going to make a lot of callous statements about business during this podcast. It's just it's just because community is great. Absolutely. But one of us can advocate for community. That's you, Nick. I could be the bad guy and just say, "Hey, it's just good business sense." Like, no matter how like no matter how you feel about your community, maybe you're dying to move. It doesn't matter. It's great business sense to expand your client profile to the millions of people who don't feel comfortable discussing complex legal terms in English. And like one of these things is that this kind of situation where there's maybe a staff member who is who is very good who who has enough Spanish or speaks or is fully bilingual can can communicate on this or it's you yourself the attorney. What that creates is an undue burden on that member of your team. And what that does is reduce their effectiveness at the other things that they can do. Yes, maybe they speak perfect Spanish, but that doesn't mean they're the right person to handle all of your incoming uh Spanish calls. Nick, you have something.

Nick: No, I don't. If you want to keep going, you can. You just you you blew my mind twice.

Tony: Okay, tell me how. I'll expand.

Nick: You blew my mind twice because you said I'm going to be callous and I'm going to do the counterpoint. I got really nervous. I was like, what counterpoint? And then you said just business. And I'm like, yeah, but we want to help lawyers do business, too. Cuz you scared me. And then I really like your point that even though the person could speak Spanish, they might not be the best person to help that person right then and there and have that conversation. Um, keep going. You were killing.

Tony: Yeah. Like imagine imagine it's a scenario where you, the law firm owner, speak great Spanish and no one else in your office does, right? Like let's say you came from Miami and you moved to Minneapolis. And so you're able to help your local Spanish-speaking community because you speak Spanish, but you have a full-time job as a business owner, full-time job as a legal professional. You can't also be your like Spanish language intake team. Uh, and the same is true if you have a staff member who's who's excellent at or who speaks Spanish, but maybe they're not great on the phone. Maybe they're not a receptionist, right? They're a parallegal or something. Maybe they're not part of your intake team, but they're… the responsibility falls to them. That is a burden on the rest of their skills because as human beings, we only have so much bandwidth mentally and so much time in order to get what you need to do done. And so, you want to make sure that you're giving the best jobs to the best people to do them. And sometimes, even if they have the skill of speaking Spanish, it doesn't mean that they necessarily have the skill of discussing complex legal issues in Spanish.

Nick: Can I reverse engineer something for you?

Tony: Go.

Nick: So, I believe you, right? I believe that you are correct. There's a local Spanish speaking community. I want to serve them. I want to do good business. I want to make money. And I want to help people, but I speak no no Spanish. And I recognize that if I had a system in place to communicate with Spanish-speaking potential clients better and actually work their case and communicate with them on an ongoing basis, I could deploy that, right? Answering Legal, totally. The coolest part for me is that you say like you deploy that solution, then you can work backwards and and start advertising or marketing that you can help that community. Here's what I think is so cool. I just watched this happen the other day and I'm a a B2B marketer, right? Like I know about law firm marketing. Some of my best friends are in law firm marketing, but it's just not my primary job. Shout out. I love doing this because I love knowing people and I love smart people and giving people credit. Shout out to Blue Seven Content and Victoria Lozano. Victoria Lozano just opened a new law firm. She does estate planning. Uh she works for with Blue Seven Content with uh Alan Watson for a few years and they write SEO content. And here's what I think is so cool. I don't know anything about her local community or the community that she serves, but she must because she's a good marketer and and a good law firm owner. She landed a new client from SEO in the first like 14 to 28 days that her new law firm is open. The person, I think she thought this was so cool that she got the person to either type it uh back into Google or or like spoke to the person about how they heard about her and uh and put it back in herself. The query was something like estate planning lawyer for a elderly gay couple in XYZ area wherever it was.

Tony: Very specific search. Sure. \

Nick: But how cool is that? Because say you want to help your local Spanish-speaking community and you want them to feel comfortable to reach out to you in their native language. Because if I were to try and hire a lawyer in German, I would feel not as comfortable or confident or really have the ability to explain in great detail the important aspects of my case. It would be really hard. Um and so that might be discouraging. And so when you open yourself up to that community, people can have like all these specific types of problems that only affect that community. and they can have these complex searches and find you as the solution. I think that is so cool. I know I like cross referenced a bunch of stuff in order to get there, but how cool is that?

Tony: Yeah, I want to say two things here. One is that we're I'm talking about Spanish because A it's the second largest spoken language in the United States and B because it's the language that I speak and it's the language that is spoken on streets of Miami where I grew up and live. If you are encountering a legal issue and English is not your primary language, unfortunately for you, English is the primary language of the legal system of the United States. All of your documents, they're they're going to have it in English. If you're lucky, they'll have it in whatever language you speak. Like here in Miami, they often do have documents in Spanish. Uh when I do jury duty, they have a whole thing. It's like if you don't feel comfortable in English, you're excused from jury duty. They take you into a side room and they explain in Spanish the for the reasons of the legal record the entirety of the legal proceeding even in Miami has to happen in in English. And so if you don't I mean when I was there last time the the attorney someone answered in Spanish and the attorney said I speak Spanish but for the purposes of the record I need you to repeat that in English. You know, so people are encountering complex legal scenarios in a language that's foreign to them and they may not be able to translate it into the legal terminology in the language they speak. They may not even know the legal terminology in the language they speak. Like how many people in in America who speak only English are lucky enough to never encounter the law ever? There's plenty of them. Um my dad always makes fun of me because I relearned Spanish. My accent is not great. It's if I were to speak Spanish to an American, they would not really know the difference. But to my dad, who, you know, a native Spanish speaker through and through, unlike me, uh, he always says it sounds like someone who's running for mayor of Miami, right? But here's the thing is that when you're advertising and you're doing that in, let's say you don't speak a word of Spanish, but you do an advertisement radio read and you you practice it and you read it in Spanish, I can tell you from experience, a local businesses that advertised in Spanish to my grandparents, I would laugh because I speak English and I think it's funny that their accent is bad. My grandparents loved it when someone was speaking Spanish to them. It instantly made them. I would watch television, you know, with my grandmother and a commercial would come on, uh, you know, a guy who does not speak Spanish reading a script in Spanish and I would think it was funny and she would so be so appreciative. She'd say, "I need to call that guy. I want, you know, I really trust I instantly it is an instant trust factor." And you might feel silly, but there's there's plenty of data out there if you if you're if you want proof where speaking that language in your advertisement will make you very effective. And the benefit of doing something like finding additional help to handle calls from non-English-speaking clients is that if you live in a city with a very specific immigrant population, you can cater to them in your in your advertising and see huge dividends.

Nick: I am not sure of… and that's a very interesting cultural insight. I love that. I am not sure of the specific cultural populations of where I live, but I know it's very diverse and everybody who knows me knows that I travel a lot on Long Island. It's it's mostly because I used to be a uh a competitive Olympic weightlifter, although I don't look like it. And where I used to lift and work out was uh far further out east from where I live in a town called Riverhead. And my friend still lives out in Riverhead and he coaches CrossFit. And so I go out there and we're very very close with him and his girlfriend. Uh so my wife and I go out there and we're like visiting my old stomping ground. I'm at like a convenience store buying a Gatorade and I'm like, "Oh my god, I used to come to this and then go right down there was the gym that I lifted at." And then we would go to eat like right after over here. And we're standing in a parking lot and this is a very predominantly uh Spanish neighborhood that I'm in at the at the current moment. And I turn around and I've been in this parking lot a million times, but I never appreciated this because I haven't been doing this as long as I have now. And one of the big signs in green lit up is just abogado.

Tony: Yeah.

Nick: And I look at my wife and I go, "Do you know what that means?" And she goes, "No." I said, "It means lawyer." And she's like, "Oh, that's so cool." And you know me, I love language and I'm like, "It comes from like advocatus, like advocate, and that's like where the meaning comes from." And she's, "That's so cool." I don't think she probably thought it was that cool. It's so interesting to me because like someone like my wife is not cognizant of that, right? So somebody else might not be cognizant that like they're trying to engage with the local community. And I want to talk about how you can actually like engage with those customers. We were talking a lot about why it's so important. Law firms who need or are looking to engage with their local community and do the type of thing that Tony and I are talking about need to have a solution. Um, and we did this on last episode too, right, in your marketing on your website and and uh obtaining phone calls, right?

Tony: This is one of those things that's very difficult to do without hiring additional help. We can we can get to that in a second. Listen, uh, Google Translate, it gets better every day. It's not perfect. If you know someone who speaks the language you're trying to use, it's easier when it's a language that uses the Latin alphabet, but if you're trying to translate to Russian or Mandarin, good luck, right? But, you know, you can find ways to, let's say, a form on your website, you can put a little drop down that says like what language, you know, uh, what language do you prefer to speak in? English, Spanish. you just list off the biggest ones in your area, right? if you're in um I know that in the Midwest, you know, there's often um large immigrant populations from other places that aren't the southern half of the uh American continent, but uh you list off whatever language is the biggest and then other and you can have them fill it in and you can set up uh you know, automations that send out the email in English or it sends out the email in English with a translation in whatever language they spoke or you know, this is all to help lay the groundwork when you're on the phone with someone outside of some kind of live translation service like the kind that Answering Legal provides. Uh it's very difficult to do that. But often uh people who have trouble speaking English will bring along a relative to do the translating for them. But what what your job is without spending any money, what your job is is to make that process as simple as possible. And the best way to do that is with educational material that is in whatever language it is that you're expanding to.

Nick: When I was a young young salesman at Answering Legal, there was a very wonderful man who owned a law firm in Connecticut. I don't remember his name, but for whatever reason, Connecticut was one of my territories at the time. And we just had this great relationship. I would call him up. I would try to sell him the service. He would tell me no. We would chat for a little bit and he would say maybe in the future because I don't think it's a bad idea, but he had objections and uh and we could never just, you know, like cross that that line. And the true part of this story is that my father had a double hip replacement uh in one of the years that I was a salesman here and I used to run his business for him. So uh the company agreed to let me take 2 weeks to go run that business and in the interim still like uh speak with my prospective clients and you know call people and and try to earn commission without getting my base salary. So, I'm not doing well in sales. I'm running a uh Wise Potato Chip warehouse uh while my dad recovers from hip surgery. And I get a call from my friend in Connecticut. Calls me up and he says, "Hey, Nick, I know you have this answering service. I know you can answer in Spanish. I know we've talked about how important that is to me because I have a local Spanish speaking community. Here's what I do want to do. I don't want to hire your service, but I would like to deploy what you have to offer in live translation because of the people that call me. I don't speak Spanish myself. I have a staff member who does, but she is part-time and I would like to on demand be able to speak to these Spanish- speaking callers who are calling me. And I said, I don't know if we do that. It was a very young company at the time. I was a younger man. And I said, can we do this? and they said, "We don't really have the resources to do this one service for this one person who you can't get to even agree to use the answering service." And so we did not do it. Well, fast forward to what late late last year, early this year, two things are now true. Our answering service here is fully staffed. The the call center side, the people who actually answer the phones, day and night, 24 hours with bilingual receptionists. So, we do that. we can answer your calls or at the very least uh let somebody know that we're about to transfer the call to somebody who can handle their their uh their call in Spanish. Um we send you the intake and all of that. But then what if your firm isn't I don't know able to communicate with that person. Um and you haven't even like you haven't thought about it, right? Say you're not set up for any of that. You're not even advertising for it, but you do have the great fortune of somebody in your community reaching out to you in Spanish. Well, we now offer on-demand live translation services in like 186 on demand languages. So, here's the process that I envision and that is usually happening because there's a few hundred people on this service now, this live translation service, is you hear from a a client who doesn't speak your native language. You get the message, it says what language that they uh are speaking, and then you got to call them back. You can tell us you need to call them back and we have a live translation service. You can do it on video call, you can do it on phone call, you could do it in-person. We've done in-person ones. Uh and we provide a live translator… interpreter?

Tony: That's really cool.

Nick: The word is interpreter. Translation services. The person who does the interpreting is an interpreter.

Tony: Mhm. That's really cool. In person. I did not know about the in-person ones.

Nick: So here's here's what's cool about that. People have their own preferences. Um, some people like to do a Google meet with their lawyer, some people like to go to the office, some people like to do a phone call consultation or or meeting or whatever have you. My envision… vision for it was that it would be mostly video calls. Uh, it was not. A lot of people want to do phone calls cuz they're mobile. They're on the move. They want to take the call in the car. They don't want to crash. And some people, we had an inquiry where uh one of our attorneys asked, "Hey, this person wants to come into my office, but we want to sit together and have the interpreter on the phone with us on the computer screen. Can we do that?" And we were like, "Yeah, just both of you sit in front of the same computer and we'll do that." And then they have a conversation. I think it's so cool.

Tony: I'll follow that up with with a story of my own. A much shorter, final story here to close off the podcast is to talk about how much your clients will appreciate this. Um

28:04

before I worked for Answering Legal, I worked for a company that had a contract with the New York State Department of Labor to help process unemployment claims from the pandemic. Uh obviously New York State, one of the largest states by population and in the country and they had very generous uh unemployment for the pandemic and New York State is also one of the most diverse states in the country. So, not only do you have a lot of people speak Spanish, you have whole community of people in Brooklyn who uh speak Hebrew, right? Or Yiddish, and they and their English is not that great.

Nick: Probably Yiddish.

Tony: Yeah, it's like 50/50. It depends on if they're I had a lot of people who were um spent a lot of time in Israel, so they spoke a lot of Hebrew, right? We would get calls and we had a service on this contracting on this contract where we would press a button and we had a live translator and it was not something that they had at the beginning because people are often unprepared but they implemented it later and I can't tell you how many times I spoke to someone who had been for months trying to get this money that would change their lives and they weren't able to communicate with the person who was trying to help them and said I'm sorry you need this document but they're there speaking in Spanish or Yiddish or Hebrew or Mandarin and saying, "I have that document. Why can't you, you know, whatever it is, whatever the miscommunication was, I joined after they had this translation service and I was also on the Spanish line so I could answer in Spanish and talk." And I cannot tell you how many people I helped who broke down into tears because they were finally able to communicate their issue. And when you do something like that for someone, you don't, you know, I'll be callous, you get their business, but you don't just get their business, you get their whole family's business. The next time someone in their family has a legal issue, they're going to say, "No, no, no. Call John Smith. Call Tom Lawyer. He speaks Telugu.” Whatever language it is. And it is going to create such a ripple effect in your community. Again, that will make you money. I'm going to be callous about it, but it's also going to be like some it's going to be some of the most heartwarming interactions you have ever had in your career because you're going to finally provide this service thanks to the translation service, the live translation services offered by Answering Legal and our bilingual answering service. Nick, I know we referenced Answering Legal a few times during today's episode. But I just want to let listeners know that they can head to answeringlegal.com to learn more about our virtual receptionist service and our live translation service. There's also a link in the bio of this episode to get started with a 400 minute free trial of our answering service.

Nick: Thanks for sharing Tony and a special thank you to all of our listeners.

Tony: Be sure to join us for the next episode of Legal Intake Experts. All episodes of the show can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel.

Nick: We'll see you next time, everyone.