S05E08: Interpreting Services for Law Firms

Intro

Hello and welcome to the Translation Company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services and the language industry. The Translation Company Talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation, localization, transcription, interpreting, and language technology. The Translation Company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi 

Welcome to today’s episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast. Today we are going to be discussing the landscape of interpreting services for law firms, primarily in the United States. Joining me to cover this important topic is Linda Zamora.

Linda Zamora is a California court interpreter and owner of Iberican Language Services, Inc. She was born in Ventura, California, but raised in Mexico. She returned to California as a teenager. Linda earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature, and culture and a minor in Latino Health administration from California State University, Long Beach in 2005.

Before her interpreting career, she held various administration and marketing positions in the healthcare industry. After the Great Recession of 2008, she changed careers to interpretation, bringing together her cultural background, education, and travel experiences. Linda began freelancing as a court interpreter in 2011, and in 2014, started her own interpreting and translation business, providing these services in all languages to clients in the legal, business, education and medical fields.

Since being certified, she has worked in over 2,000 assignments, ranging from depositions, trials, mediations, medical and legal appointments, and television shows like Jet Duty and Hot Bench. She is a founding member of the Association of Independent Judicial Interpreters of California, or AIJIC, and served as a board member for Interpreters Guild of America.

She currently manages her business in the heart of Orange County, serving clients all over California. Linda, welcome to the Translation Company Talk Podcast.

Linda Zamora

Thank you, Sultan. It is a pleasure to be here.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m so happy that you’re here speaking with me today, and I’m excited about everything that you have to share. For those that don’t know you in our industry, please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.

 

Linda Zamora

Absolutely. Yes. So, my name is Linda Zamora. I have a translation and interpretation business in Southern California. I am personally a court certified interpreter by the State of California, and I have been doing business since 2011.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Can you please tell us how did you find yourself in the language industry? When did you join and what was the motivation?

Linda Zamora

Goodness. Yes. So, do you remember the Great Recession of 2008?

Sultan Ghaznawi

Who doesn’t?

Linda Zamora

Okay. So that shook the World, and it shook me as well and it just sent me into the unknown because I found myself without a job. Then I got a job, but I got laid off, and I got a job, and I got laid off and it just happened so much that I thought to myself, I need to come up with a business idea because I’m tired of depending on somebody else for my paycheck.

I’m fortunate enough, Sultan, that I personally speak three languages. I speak, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I was born in California, but raised in Mexico, so I’m fully bicultural and bilingual. Also, I’m going to say, luckily, my bachelor’s degree is in Spanish literature and culture. So, I knew that I had a solid foundation in languages and culture.

I started looking at becoming an interpreter, feeling that it was bringing a lot of my knowledge, education, and experience together. Also, let me mention the fact that I have lived in Argentina, and I studied in Spain, and I traveled all over South America. So, I felt it was a perfect combination. So, I went to interpreting school, I became certified and initially, I thought I’d be a court employee, but it turned out differently.

I became a freelancer. And from there, a business owner.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Linda, what has changed since you started? How has the customer behavior changed for you in terms of asking for interpreters? What have you noticed that’s different since you started?

Linda Zamora

Yes. So, my business serves mostly the legal community here in California, Sultan. I get a lot of work in the workers’ compensation, so these are employees that have gotten hurt at work, and they filed a claim. And then also, we get a lot of work from personal injury attorneys, family law attorneys, estate attorneys, so a lot of civil as well. Those are two completely different monsters.

The workers’ compensation has a lot of challenges. I find that the civil area is easier for me to handle, easier, I say, because there’s no insurance company involved, and that just causes a lot of extra work on our end. I have noticed that the more insurance companies get involved, the more difficult it is to do business. It’s just a lot of additional work.

But the demand for interpreters is there and we get them, the main language being in California. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but clearly it is Spanish by far. And then we get a lot of Asian languages requests.

Sultan Ghaznawi

I have invited you today to speak about the state of interpreting services for the legal industry. I know that you’re in California and the jurisdiction is slightly different, but please give us a high-level view of what does that mean? How are the legal interpreting services provided and consumed today?

Linda Zamora

Yes. The world is always changing, Sultan. So let me start today and then I will go back and forth between today and the past. Today, we serve the legal community with court interpreters, mostly in person. Again, there is some virtual work that happens, but it’s moving towards back in-person and like everyone else, a few years ago, everything went virtual, and we dealt with all those challenges.

Today, we’re again moving to in-person, which has become a challenge because many interpreters feel more comfortable working from home, and they no longer want to work in person. So, we have a lot of challenges in that area. Many times, it’s difficult to find interpreters to work in-person because of the ones that have chosen to stay home or have chosen a digital nomad life, and they are working remotely from a beautiful place in the world, that is not California.

Sultan Ghaznawi

I think that’s common across the different places and different states in the U.S. I’m guessing you’re working with law firms, as you mentioned, and your jurisdiction. What are some of the challenges that your clients would like to resolve with your service today?

Linda Zamora

Yeah, so that’s always the language barrier. We get requests for things like attorneys wanting to talk to a potential client. Also, during discovery process, we get requests to translate documents, discovery documents, making sure that the person who answered those documents understands what they said and signs them. So, attorneys, in my experience, are doing a very good job at having a level playing field in overcoming that communication barrier based on language. You know, as businesses, they want to have all the business they can have, and we are happy to collaborate with them in assisting them with language services.

Sultan Ghaznawi

The legal industry, Linda, like insurance and health care, you just pointed towards insurance as well that you work with. The legal industry has its own set of issues and problems related to languages. What did you find to be an impediment for delivering legal services faster, when it comes to minorities and at-risk demographics?

Linda Zamora

Faster? I guess, it would be the lack of interpreters, Sultan. A lot of times, it’s very difficult to find them. We try to look in every other place we know where to go. But I believe, at least from my perspective, is not finding enough interpreters, especially the populations that you are mentioning.

In California, specifically, we have in Central California, a very large population of immigrants from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. For the most part, they don’t speak Spanish. They speak an indigenous language. And it is so challenging to find an interpreter who speaks that indigenous language and English. We have had to hire relay interpreting. So, we have the indigenous language interpreter from that language to Spanish and then Spanish to English. You can just imagine how exciting that is, right?

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, it’s not unheard of what you’re just describing where lack of resources is preventing people from accessing their basic rights to communicate and to get things such as healthcare concerns addressed. Let’s get back to the legal industry.

So, law firms operate in regulated space and have strict requirements with regards to confidentiality and so forth. How do you find preparing or training interpreters for such specific cases to make sure that they retain and maintain the utmost confidentiality and to make sure that the client’s trust is not broken?

Linda Zamora

Of course, yes. So, California in general, and I’m sure this is the case everywhere else, or I guess I would hope it is. Confidentiality is always one of the things that we stress will be kept at all times, regardless of whether it’s legal or any other industry. We understand nobody wants their information out there for anyone. So, in California, specifically court interpreters, medical interpreters as well, we are sworn that everything will be maintained confidential.

That is something we uphold very dearly. And being in business now for, I’m not good with math, Sultan, however number of years that is since 2011, I’ve never encountered a situation where confidentiality was broken or compromised. We’re always in the legal industry, especially, I shouldn’t say especially, but the legal industry as well, always confidentiality, it’s not that it’s a concern, but it’s something that we keep in mind.

Personally, as a business or in my business, we never ask for anything. The client requests an interpreter, we send them and all we get from the interpreter is their invoice and their end time, because we are just not concerned with anything else, and we shouldn’t be asking, and we don’t ask. And by the same token, I know if I were to ask anything of the interpreter, the interpreter will most likely say that it’s confidential information and I cannot share it.

So, I don’t see that as an issue at all. I feel that, at least with the professionals that we work with, it’s never an issue.

Sultan Ghaznawi

That speaks to the professionalization of this specific industry and of the integrity of the professionals that work here. So yeah, that’s something that always makes us feel proud, that we have the right people doing this work. Let me talk about, you alluded earlier about virtual interpreting. So, the proliferation of virtual interpreting has been ridiculously high in the past few years, especially driven by COVID.

We saw so many organizations adopt virtual interpreting and things are moving away from that, but not as much. How has that affected delivering the service for this sector, by which I mean, the legal industry, law firms and so forth?

Linda Zamora

Well, in the beginning, like you’re saying, the beginning, I mean, by the beginning of the pandemic shutdown. So, it was a huge challenge, mainly because of technology and not knowing how to use it or not having it available. In the legal industry, most of our work is in depositions, hearings, mediation, arbitration. We don’t do any court work whatsoever, meaning trials in court or virtual. I shouldn’t say whatsoever. We do very little of that work.

I guess the challenge, Sultan, today, is again having available interpreters who want to do it in-person, because at one point I was thinking that having virtual proceedings was so convenient that why would anyone want to go back to in-person? But I’ve been proven wrong. Most people want to go back to doing business in-person and conducting these proceedings in-person.

The challenge today is finding those interpreters who are willing and able to be there in-person. I think we overcame the virtual and technical issues. And now, you know, in-person is always a challenge.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Yes, indeed. I think there’s also this assumption that virtual interpreting will be the norm going forward. But with certain industries like legal or healthcare, I think there is more of an on-site presence that will be needed as it was pre-pandemic. Let’s talk about how technology can play a role here, with technology making significant advances. Do you find that law firms are adopting technology that helps interpreters to be more efficient and effective?

Linda Zamora

Not in my experience, Sultan, not law firms. We work very closely with core reporting agencies. Since we do a lot of depositions and everything else that I mentioned, there’s always a core reporter present. I find that it’s been core reporting offices that have had to make a lot of changes in technology because they are accommodating their law firm clients.

We happen to benefit from that because we just show up as interpreters. This is how the cookie crumbled during the pandemic, that it was the core reporting offices who picked up the responsibility, I guess, of providing that technology. They have adapted very, very quickly.

As you know, Zoom has the ability to have a simultaneous interpretation, which was a big, big challenge a few years ago. Since making it available, things work a lot smoother. But I have to hand it to core reporting agencies for doing such a great job providing the technology, making our lives easier, and certainly the life of legal law firms that we work with.

Sultan Ghaznawi

How do you see law firms changing in the face of growing diversity and immigration in the U.S.?

Linda Zamora

So I would think they are going to continue to bring bilingual and bicultural individuals. In California, we have every other background in every other language you can imagine. I see a lot of law firms hiring attorneys and staff that are bilingual and I believe the change in that trend will continue to serve as their clients.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Sorry, I didn’t realize I had put myself on mute. How much repeat work versus transactional demand do you see coming from this sector, I mean, the legal industry?

Linda Zamora

There’s a lot of repeat work. For example, a personal injury law firm, their process is always the same. So, they get a client, they start a lawsuit for, let’s just say somebody fell at a supermarket and they are filing a lawsuit. So, even though we come in transactionally during, I don’t know, discovery, a deposition, or whatever it is, in each case is specific. It’s always the same steps for each case.

So, we find that whenever our clients need an interpreter, whether maybe Korean or Vietnamese or French, we already know at what point they are going to bring us in, because again, it’s the same process. It’s just a different language and a different case.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thank you, Linda. That speaks a lot about how stable the legal sector as a whole is, for a customer, in our industry. Let’s focus on the LSP side of things. This is where we will have a lot of people having different experiences and depending on where they’re located. What do we get wrong about working with law firms? What are some of the misconceptions and issues, or assumptions, that we have that’s not correct?

Linda Zamora

From the LEP perspective, you mean?

Sultan Ghaznawi

As a whole, as a business. Basically, is it easy to work with law firms? You know, we were talking about this earlier, but when you have multiple people involved, things can get complicated. You know, some clients are difficult to handle, especially in the law firm. In some cases, the translation work after it’s done, then the logistics are passed on to the end client and it becomes very convoluted. What has your experience been like?

Linda Zamora

Yes. So fortunately, or unfortunately, I don’t know, our business is not too, too large, Sultan. We know our clients very well. Each one of our clients came to us either because we know them in person or it was a word of mouth referral. I feel very fortunate to have this organically growing business.

We deliver very personal service to our clients. Even when there are multiple people involved in a case, we make sure that we are communicating with them as often as necessary. I’m not finding that it is a difficulty in terms of having everybody know what they need to know in terms of what’s going on, either with a document being translated or an interpreter being there.

Sultan Ghaznawi

I know you talked about it, but I’ve had conversations with certain LSP colleagues where I’ve heard that there are issues with law firms, including payment practices. A few LSP’s have completely stopped servicing law firms because they just have had bad experience. In your opinion, based on what you’re seeing, is this a wider issue than a few specific or sporadic cases?

Linda Zamora

In my experience, yes. But again, my business is not that large, Sultan. So, I feel fortunate, knock on wood, that I don’t experience that with my clients, particularly in the civil area. Workers’ compensation is a completely different animal and there are a lot of issues in terms of payment and workers’ compensation. Many.

I would bore you to death with all the problems that exist in that arena. But luckily in civil, it’s very different, very smooth. In my personal experience, I can only think of a couple of times when I had an issue, I did one time have to take someone to small claims for payment. Nobody has a pleasant experience when you have to go to court. Certainly, that was my case. I did not enjoy having to file a lawsuit against somebody for payment. But fortunately, it’s only happened maybe a couple of times and after learning that lesson, it’s how do I change my practices so this never happens again.

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Sultan Ghaznawi

Do you find the structure of interpreting team that would service the sector would be different from a typical interpreting service?

Linda Zamora

What do you mean by an interpreting team?

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, the makeup of your interpreters, do you have to qualify certain interpreters for specific clients, based on their experience and so forth?  I mean, in healthcare, you would need someone who would, if you’re building teams of healthcare interpreters, who would go and assist in different situations, they must have medical experience and so forth, right?

So, with interpreting for the legal industry, what type of specific requirements are there in place in order to create the right team for a specific client?

Linda Zamora

Sure. So, I believe this is where the transactional part comes in because I have never yet encountered a situation where I have to have a team of interpreters ready for any specific proceeding going on. It’s usually just one interpreter, who goes to a deposition or trial or whatever it may be, and not a team of interpreters.

Certainly, to prepare them for the proceeding, we provide them as much information as we can from the client. So, we send the deposition notice, or the hearing notice, we tell them what the case is about, any information that we may have that may help them be more ready for it.

If it is something very specialized, say, I don’t know, a lawsuit about that requires nautical terminology, we will ask our client for a glossary of terms that will be used during the proceeding, so, we can send that to the interpreter ahead of time to avoid having to be checking reference materials during the proceeding and just for things to go more smoothly.

Sultan Ghaznawi

How about the interpreters themselves? Do they find working for a law firm setting interesting, challenging and enjoyable? Is it something that they would like to continue working with, or do you find that some of them have aspirations to move on to other industries?

Linda Zamora

Well, I think that is a very subjective decision. So, I find that interpreters in general have a lot of skills. So, we have interpreters that are also painters or singers or dancers, a lot of artistry in the interpreting industry, and they do both. I would think that from the perspective of being in any type of profession, Sultan, I would think that an engineer at some point gets tired of doing the same thing, or, I don’t know, a teacher.

So, in interpreting, I personally find, being an interpreter myself, at some point, the repetition gets to me where I feel that I need to take a break from interpreting before going back, only because it gets very repetitive. Interpreting is exhausting mentally. There are times where my jaw hurts after finishing a deposition.

What I find is that it’s very stable. I would think it’s because I work with mostly freelance interpreters. And so they choose when to accept work and when not to. And I think and I hope that when they are not working, they are fulfilling their lives with something good and exciting and it rejuvenates them and reenergizes them to continue working as an interpreter.

Sultan Ghaznawi

What type of credentials, clearances or background checks should an interpreter possess to be a good candidate for this specific sector?

Linda Zamora

Yes. So, anything that has to do with court, interpreters have to be certified by the State of California, period. The training is very demanding. The exam is very demanding. So, having that certificate is first and foremost, they have to have it, period. Besides that, at least in the requests that I have, they really don’t need anything else.

Again, the training they have received and having to be certified, it’s all the recommendations that they should have. But there are areas in which, for example, interpreters that may go do jail interviews for an attorney, they have to have clearance from jail. If they are going to work in federal cases, they have to have a federal certification, first of all, for Spanish interpreters and then they have to have a certain type of clearance.

I believe in immigration and depending on where you are interpreting in immigration, you also have to have a certain clearance. But we don’t do immigration work. We only do translation work in immigration. So, for us, it’s just having the certification from the State of California.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Linda, in your experience, what languages are today driving the demand for interpreting in the legal field, based on how things are changing?

Linda Zamora

It’s Spanish. Always, always. So I don’t know. I don’t think Spanish has changed since I started as an interpreter and as a business. It’s always been Spanish. We have a lot of demand for Asian languages, Mandarin, Korean, Cantonese, Vietnamese, those languages. But by far, Spanish is always the number one language we get requests for.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Understood. Now, are there any logistical challenges to deal with in this sector? Linda, do you find enough resources for all languages? You were mentioning earlier that that demographic is changing. Just to give some context, the question is about finding interpreters and you mentioned earlier that there’s not enough of them, right? And they’re changing. They want to, some of them move on and just be virtual interpreters or they work remotely.

So let me put the question again. Are there logistical challenges to deal with, in the legal sector? Do you find enough resources for all languages that you need?

Linda Zamora

Yes. So basically, it’s the same answer as before Sultan. Unfortunately, there are not enough interpreters and then our challenge is usually finding someone to be there in person. It’s just a huge challenge. There are times when it takes us three, four or five days to find an interpreter to be present, meaning in person somewhere.

Sometimes we need to go back to the client and say, we can’t find somebody who can be there in person, are you okay with a virtual interpreter?

As much as we want to fulfill our commitment to our clients to provide them what they need, sometimes it’s just not feasible or it’s not possible and we have to offer other options. So, then a virtual option. I’m kind of surprised as to how many times we have to offer a virtual option because in person it’s just not possible.

Sultan Ghaznawi

If you were to offer advice to our colleagues on the buyer side, I mean, those folks in the law firms that are contracting your company and other interpreting companies. In the legal sector, what would you suggest for them to change? What kind of change would you like to see in order for your work to be done seamlessly for the interpreters to find it easier to work with that industry?

Linda Zamora

Yeah, so I’m not really sure that law firms would have, at least again in my experience, that law firms will have to change anything. The firms that we work with, I don’t see that they are asking for anything out of the ordinary. I honestly, I have no recommendations. We work well with all of them. Most give us plenty of notice to find their interpreter. I feel very fortunate that we have the clients that we have and very fortunate to keep them and to be working with them.

Sultan Ghaznawi

As we reach the end of this interview, Linda, what are your thoughts and advice for LSPs that are or are aspiring to offer their services in the sector?

Linda Zamora

I would say know your target. Who are you wishing to attract as your clients? Then once you do have them as clients, get to know them really well. I very much enjoy the relationships that I have built with my clients over the years. Getting to know them as people, the driving force of anyone is, in general, is their families.

For a lot of my clients, I’ve met their spouses or their children. We get together every now and then, and it just solidifies our relationship even more. I know to trust them. They know to trust me. So LSPs that want to go and have more business in the legal industry, get to know your clients. I would think that’s probably a general rule in any industry, but to me, it has worked to my advantage.

I didn’t know that it was going to be so important. And now that I see the loyalty of my clients, it feels good. I feel that this is really, really nice to have. So again, get to know your clients. Don’t ignore them once you bring them on as clients. Don’t ignore them. I think from there, everything else goes very smoothly. And yeah, I love working where I am working Sultan.

Sultan Ghaznawi

What a great conversation, Linda. I’m so happy we finally got to speak and discuss interpreting services for the legal industry. I am excited that we would be speaking about top this topic going forward as the legal sector plays a bigger role in sourcing interpreting services. I believe there is a lot more to learn and absorb about this specific topic.

With that, thank you for your time and for sharing your thoughts and experiences with me and the industry.

Linda Zamora

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Okay, it’s time for my roundup of the interview and my analysis as to what has been discussed.

Working with regulated industries like the legal sector, opens up a lot of opportunities for LSPs. However, they also present challenges that normally we don’t experience in working with other sectors. Law firms have a certain way of working and the nature of the activities require LSPs to adapt to a certain way that would fit into this sectors’ unique processes and procedures.

With the demand for interpreting on the rise, growing multicultural demographic in the western hemisphere and the United States Government regulating access to information in people’s native languages, it makes sense for LSPs to be in this space. Differentiation can only occur in this sector if you understand the current linguistic bottlenecks that delay or impede legal proceedings and address them through a combination of human and technology enablements.

That brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Linda. Please keep your feedback and comments coming. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible or your platform of choice and give this episode a 5-star rating.

 

Until next time.

 

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