Why your Los Angeles law firm needs real Spanish pages

How many people speak Spanish at home

The US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey asks people what language they speak at home. In the 2024 one-year estimates, about 3.49 million people age 5 and older in Los Angeles County speak Spanish at home. That is about 38% of everyone in that age group (figures as compiled by the Los Angeles Almanac).

Statewide, the same 2024 survey counts about 10.75 million Spanish speakers at home, roughly 29% of Californians age 5 and older (as compiled by the Migration Policy Institute).

One more number matters for law firms. Of the LA County Spanish speakers, about 1.48 million say they speak English less than “very well.” For them, legal words like “liability,” “statute of limitations” or “wrongful termination” in English can be a real barrier.

Do this: look at your own intake. If a good share of your calls are in Spanish but your website is English only, you are losing people before they ever call.

Real translation, not a translate button

Machine translation has improved, but in our experience legal pages are where it fails most. It can turn a careful sentence about fees into a promise, or use a word that sounds strange to someone from Mexico, El Salvador or Guatemala. A visitor can tell in a few seconds when a page was not written for them.

Google also cares. Its spam policies list “automated transformations like synonymizing, translating” as part of scaled content abuse when they are used to mass-produce pages. And Google says it “uses the visible content of your page to determine its language,” so a widget that swaps text after the page loads does little for search.

Do this instead: use a human translator who knows legal Spanish, or start with a machine draft and have a fluent Spanish speaker on your team rewrite it. Then have an attorney check it, the same way you check your English pages.

Which pages to translate first

You don’t need to translate every blog post on day one. Start with the pages that bring calls:

1. Home page: who you are, what cases you take, how to reach you
2. Your top two or three practice areas: the cases that bring the most work
3. Contact page: phone, address, hours and a short form, all in Spanish
4. FAQ: fees, how long cases take, what to bring to the first meeting

Write the Spanish pages for how people really search. Some people search fully in Spanish, like “abogado de accidentes,” and others mix English and Spanish. Ask your Spanish-speaking staff what callers actually say.

Do this: treat each Spanish page as a real page, not a copy. Our guides to practice area pages and the 12 pages every law firm website needs apply in Spanish too.

Tell Google about both versions

Google’s multilingual site guide recommends “different URLs for each language version.” For example, yourfirm.com/car-accidents and yourfirm.com/es/accidentes-de-auto. Don’t switch the language with cookies or browser settings, and don’t redirect people to Spanish automatically. Add a clear “Español” link instead.

Then connect the two versions with hreflang. This is a short tag that says “this page has a Spanish version, and here it is.” Google’s page on localized versions explains the rules. The two that trip people up:

• “Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.”
• If the English page points to the Spanish one but not the other way around, Google ignores the tags.

Use “en” for English and “es” for Spanish. You can add “x-default” for the page people should see when no language matches.

Do this: after launch, open a Spanish page, view the source, and check that both hreflang lines are there and point to the right pages.

Make sure someone answers in Spanish

A Spanish website that leads to an English-only voicemail is worse than no Spanish website. The person trusted you, called, and hit a wall.

• Have at least one Spanish-speaking person on the phones during business hours
• Send Spanish form leads to that person, and reply in Spanish
• Record your voicemail greeting in both languages
• Send texts, emails and intake documents in the client’s language

In our experience, a few Google Business Profile posts in Spanish, and replies in Spanish to reviews written in Spanish, also help. They show people from the first search that they can talk to you.

Do this: call your own office in Spanish once a month, from a number they don’t know, and see what happens.

California rules apply in Spanish too

Your Spanish pages are advertising, just like your English ones. Everything in our California advertising rules checklist applies to them.

One rule speaks to language directly. Comment [5] to Rule 7.1 of the California Rules of Professional Conduct says a lawyer may not imply they can provide legal services “in a language other than English” unless the lawyer can actually do so, or the communication also states, in that language, the job title of the person who speaks it. So if a paralegal or intake manager is the Spanish speaker, say so, for example “Nuestra coordinadora de admisión habla español.”

Also watch the word “notario.” In Spanish-speaking countries, a notario is often a kind of lawyer. California’s Business and Professions Code section 6126.7 bars non-attorneys from using literal translations like “notario publico” to suggest they are lawyers. Your firm should avoid using the word in a confusing way.

Do this: have an attorney who reads Spanish review every Spanish page before it goes live. For specific questions, check with an ethics counsel.

Want help with this? See Law firm websites.

Written by Sevag Boghossian

Sevag is the founder of araRank and a web developer with 6 years in law firm marketing and SEO. He builds every site we make, from Los Angeles.

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