Source – By Sydnee Chapman
Hiram Hernandez went decades without needing a lawyer. When he started looking for one during his divorce, however, he found a problem: Spanish-speaking lawyers in the area were few and far between.
The shared language often results in increased trust and understanding in addition to a more efficient legal process, according to bilingual legal professionals, and the need is increasing in Whatcom County.
Hernandez, a Bellingham resident originally from Mexico, speaks a little English but is much more comfortable with Spanish. Beyond wanting a lawyer to avoid the language barrier — and legal errors as a result — having a Spanish-speaking lawyer also made more sense financially.
“There are a lot of lawyers who, when they have to find someone to translate all the paperwork and the information, they charge a lot more,” he said in Spanish. “They charge to represent you, and then they charge extra to translate all the documents you need to sign.”
Hernandez eventually found a bilingual attorney in Bellingham: Alejandra Cabrales. Cabrales said although there are a lot of immigration attorneys in the county who speak Spanish, there aren’t very many in other specialties.
“When they find out that I speak Spanish, it’s more like a relief,” she said. “I see when a client is Spanish-speaking and the attorney is also Spanish-speaking, there’s more trust because sometimes that attorney already understands not only the Spanish but also the culture.”
Hernandez’s experience isn’t uncommon. Legal professionals said they’re seeing a growing need for Spanish-speaking legal services in the area.
The county’s Hispanic population grew 45% between 2010 and 2020, according to census data. In 2020, Hispanic residents made up 11% of the population.
Varying levels of fluency
Not all levels of bilingualism are the same, especially when it comes to a complicated field like law.
“Just because an attorney may be, let’s say, a heritage speaker of Spanish, doesn’t mean that they are going to be qualified to conduct legal matters in Spanish, and the same goes for interpreters,” said Joana Ramos of the Washington State Coalition for Language Access.
The state has a certification process for court interpreters but does not have any regulation for lawyers offering services in languages other than English.
Bellingham attorney Adrian Madrone said he’s seen more attorneys, particularly public defenders, coming in with basic proficiency in Spanish, but the majority aren’t fluent enough to function without an interpreter.
Madrone said that’s a problem since there’s been a big decrease in the availability of local interpreters, whom many lawyers rely on both in and out of court.
“In Whatcom County now, there is like one very busy Spanish interpreter, and she’s fantastic, but she is running from court to court and office to office constantly,” Madrone said, adding that there are a handful of other local interpreters who work much less frequently.
Madrone, who speaks some Spanish but also relies on interpreters, said this has forced Whatcom attorneys to rely on virtual interpreters most of the time.
Virtual services, he said, can draw out the legal process. In court, it could mean an individual is unable to ask their attorney anything in private since the interpreter is on Zoom. Outside of court, a simple document review takes much longer if the attorney has to read out the document line by line to an interpreter over the phone.
“It just makes everything less functional if you have to do it kind of piecemeal like that,” he said. “It does make things a lot harder to not have the interpreter there in person.”
Branching out
Alejandra Angulo is a trilingual paralegal at Harrison and Pai in Bellingham. She said many clients come in for immigration services but also need help on other issues like custody, protective orders or labor law violations.
“There is a lot of need of Spanish-speaking people,” she said. “There are so many people coming specifically to Washington state, specifically to Bellingham because it’s such a city that accepts so many immigrants, and I think there’s just a need to be able to help all these people that are coming into the country.”
Angulo‘s firm only offers immigration services, and Angulo said it’s hard to offer clients recommendations on where else to go when there aren’t very many Spanish-speaking attorneys offering help in those areas.
Cabrales has expertise in immigration law but opted to also pursue other areas of the law after seeing clients’ needs. She encourages bilingual lawyers to volunteer at legal clinics and other events to see if there are other areas they could branch into.
“At least for me, it was like, ‘Hey, there are other matters that are also mingled with this immigration matter’,” she said, pointing to protective orders as an example, “that would be helpful and beneficial to the client if we could just keep it with one person or at least in the same firm.”
