In just 2020 alone, there were 5,250,837 traffic collisions.
In 2021, that number jumped 16% to 6.10 million.
How prepared is your firm to handle this surge in personal injury cases? Or rather, is your firm ready to open itself up to a community of nearly 11 million people who are not only underrepresented in the legal market, but desperate for legal representation?
Despite commanding nearly 20% of the national population, only 5.8% of lawyers in the United States are Hispanic.
This means Spanish-speaking legal services remain a rare and valuable commodity in the Hispanic community.
This Is Where Your Law Firm Comes In
Soaring car accident rates result in an increased demand for legal services, this much is obvious.
But there being so few Hispanic-friendly Law Firms, this presents an opportunity for your firm to take massive shares of this untapped demographic.
That’s not all, as the primary English-speaking market increases in saturation, advertising costs sharply increase– this means more ad spends for less results.
The Spanish-speaking market, however, offers the exact opposite: Less ad spends, more results.
Here Are Our 4 Tips Lawyers Can Use To Attract and Retain Hispanic Clients
1. The Familiar Face Approach – Advanced Bilingualism
Allowing potential clients to speak with someone in their native tongue immediately transforms a lifeless and procedural attorney’s office into a familiar and welcoming study. Hispanic clients are more likely to reach out to law firms that display bilingual competence and cultural familiarity. Hispanic communities can often be full of incredibly diverse cultures and backgrounds, so it’s imperative that you take these differences into careful consideration when doing outreach.
But done right, this has the added benefit of ensuring that clients do not withhold information from you.
Even the smallest detail can completely derail an otherwise sure-win personal injury case. But recounting the events leading up to an injury can be fraught with inconsistencies, vague descriptions, and plot holes originating from withheld information– and you certainly wouldn’t want to add ‘translation error’ into that mix. For this reason, it’s imperative that you hire a bilingual employee or an interpreter that can take point on depositions and discovery processes.
Make sure to train your bilingual employees on essential questions to be asked, in Spanish, during the discovery process. Protecting the rights of a personal injury victim is difficult enough in usual circumstances. It is even more complex when language barriers prevent clients from making themselves clearly understood by a personal injury lawyer.
The Law Offices of Diaz and Gaeta suggest the following list of questions:
- What they were doing moments before the crash
- From what direction the other vehicle came
- Every action they took after the crash, including what they talked to the other driver about
- Whether they had consumed alcohol or taken any medications in the last 24 hours
To better understand your local Hispanic community, don’t be afraid to talk to business owners, neighbors and acquaintances. As your firm takes on more Hispanic clients, build genuine relationships with them to understand their background and cultural identity. Participate in local Hispanic events, visit Hispanic community centers, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
2. Controlling The Flow of Word of Mouth – Bilingual Assets
A bilingual employee can also help you create brochures, pamphlets, infographics, intake systems, and other assets that resonate with the client. These assets can be used to inform clients of their rights, demystify complex concepts, provide clarification for commonly held misconceptions, and encourage the client to be fully involved with their case.
Here are the benefits of having these assets both online and offline:
Online
- Digital visibility lets you be found online in search engines when people use Spanish keywords
- Hispanics are largely mobile and find their attorneys online
- Online assets are easy to download and share thanks to inherent virality
Offline
- Spanish pamphlets, brochures, and infographics are easy to share and pass around in person, which more effectively targets older crowds
- Magnets, merch, and brochures can be kept around the house to constantly remind clients of your firm
Hispanic clients are also quite partial to online scheduling systems. Having to call in and speak with an attorney you can’t communicate with is a sure-fire way to turn Hispanic clients away.
Our suggestion? Circumvent the issue entirely with bilingual intake systems that the client can use to self-assign and self-assess for you whether or not there’s a case. Should the client win their case, the value proposition they tell their friends and family:
“All I did was spend 5 minutes filling out an online form and then they took care of all the work, winning my case for $10,000”
Paints a much more attractive picture than the classic “come into my office so I can grill you for an hour while my frustration at the language barrier mounts and mounts until I angrily tell you to come back with a translator.”
3. Protecting the Helpless – Giving a Voice to the Voiceless
You can leverage Hispanic-friendly outreach to protect clients and hold reckless drivers accountable for their actions. Many Spanish-speaking clients may be coming from a place of grief and emotional vulnerability.
Unscrupulous insurance adjusters may take advantage of this fact to trick accident victims into accepting a lowball settlement. Because they’re not fluent in English, they won’t be able to completely understand what’s going on and find themselves accepting any paperwork that comes their way out of fear and confusion.
For this reason, Spanish-speaking personal injury lawyers representing them can provide a layer of protection, giving them a voice to speak their truth and their side of the story.
And by giving the families of fatal car wreck victims a voice, you can help them find justice and hold the perpetrators accountable for their actions.
By building trust and respect in such a raw and genuine way, you break down the walls that separate client and attorney. This relationship goes a long way in allowing you to reach out to more victims who need their voices to be heard.
4. The 21st Century Billboard – Spanish Ready Websites and Beyond
Websites are the billboards of the 21st century, and having a good one means more traffic, more interest, and more clients.
We go over how to create effective Spanish-ready websites at this link here: ____
But how do you go BEYOND just a Spanish-ready website? How do you take it to the next level?
AI tools are becoming more and more prevalent, and it’s changing the way everyone does business. These are tools designed to make our lives easier so… let them.
To supplement your website and all your digital assets, consider leveraging the power of AI virtual assistance to better serve your clientele. You can utilize AI chatbots to give personalized guided tours to the people who land on your website.
Consider building connections with Hispanic community members and local businesses to better understand their plights and their needs. This data can be used to train your AI chatbot so that it can better engage in conversations regarding the most relevant legal problems your visitors are experiencing.
Don’t stop there, you can create multi-channel systems that effectively guide your prospects to articles and blog posts you’ve made regarding their questions.
Combine this with a bilingual automated phone call system and Spanish feedback forms to improve your marketing on a regular basis. Buying patterns and consumer preferences are changing all the time, and providing a bilingual feedback form lets you stay ahead of the game AND give customers an outlet for their voices to be heard.
