Much of what we do in our practice involves stacks of documents ranging from mere pamphlet size to cartons most effectively moved with a hand truck. We recently fired off a single Hague Service Convention Request that weighed 87 pounds. Seriously– seventeen reams of paper and a whole bunch of copy toner, all because our client only called us for help after the suit had been filed. We could have advised him to keep it short. I’ve said for years now that lawyers should serve everything that’s required— but should only serve what’s required. Yet some clients throw in all but the kitchen sink out of habit. For all the wrong reasons.
- Best practice… is not sufficient reason.
- We’ve always done it that way… well, that’s a bit daft.
- Because the clerk told us to do this… just no.
Barring a rule that says “thou shalt serve XYZ with the summons,” omit XYZ from the stack. Not only because you’ll likely have to translate XYZ, but because a single page on the docket means four pages get loaded on the FedEx truck bound for Munich or Minsk– six pages if they’re headed to Mexico City. Our bottom line advice: trim that thing down, counsel, because every superfluous word and every superfluous page cost your client, dearly if you think you get paid by the word (you don’t– but guess who does).
Every once in a while, we’ll have a client (all of our clients are litigators) just dump a bunch of PDFs on us and say “here you go– everything is translated and ready to serve.” Sorry, but no– you have to line these things up for us, in order, in each respective language.
But we had an interesting case not long ago that posed a tricky problem: it was a petition to confirm an arbitral award, which itself had been issued in German. The contract was in German. The applicable law was German. Everything about the matter was German except for the location of the losing party’s assets, which were, you guessed it… right here in ‘Murica.
So the prevailing party’s (ie: plaintiff’s) counsel attached translations of the award, the contract, and the arbitration venue’s rulebook to the petition as exhibits. They even attached the applicable German statutes, translated. Now, we simply don’t have time to exhaustively review the pleadings our clients send us, and language providers spot and point out foreign text anyway, so we march off to our translators to solicit bids for the project as it existed in bulk. Hefty five figures, which prompted the client to respond “but the exhibits are already in German.”
Except no, they’re not. What you sent was in English– the exhibits are not in German. If the docs started in German, you just filed translations with your complaint, and that is problematic in and of itself. We still have to send everything with a translation.
Now, it’s not difficult to reverse engineer the source documents when counsel has already had much of the linguistic work done. That approach saves the litigant a whole bunch of cash, but not all of the translation cost goes away just because the original stuff was in the target language to begin with. ECF headers and exhibit title pages still need to be translated, and pagination from one to the other must be relatively close in order to pass muster in Notamerica.* When the venue rules are a 100-page booklet with dense, single spaced text but your translation is 210 pages of double-spaced 12-point… that’s where problems arise, especially if your translator’s work was shoddy.
So we have to charge you for translation, even though there’s not much actual language work involved. Documents that don’t show up on a foreign authority’s desk formatted properly, are sure to be rejected.
Above all else, we still have to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb, just to make sure. Now and again, that actually takes more effort that just translating from scratch.
* Formatting is a critical consideration when machine translation enters the equation. See here for more.