A morning list, third case on, and the client sat in the second row with a relative beside him. Within a minute of the case being called on it was plain that he had not followed a word counsel had said on his behalf.
Nobody had booked an interpreter. His daughter stood up and offered to do it, in good faith and with no idea why that was a problem, and I put the matter off. Take the arithmetic on that half day hearing, illustrative and nothing more. Counsel was paid for the day, a solicitor attended with her, the client lost a day of work, and the relisting came back four months later, when everyone was paid a second time to do the same half day properly. Even at modest rates the wasted cost of one morning runs into four figures, and the client carries the delay. None of it turned on the merits. It turned on a fact about the client that nobody had written down.
Why a relative cannot do it
The objection to a family member interpreting is practical before it is anything else. The relative is often a witness in the same case, or stands to gain or lose by how it ends, and a person interpreting for a party has to be indifferent to the outcome. Nobody present can check the work. Neither I nor the solicitors spoke the language, so when a question went to the client there was no way of knowing whether it had been put faithfully, softened, argued with, or answered by the relative on the client's behalf. I have watched a relative and a client talk to each other for half a minute and then heard the answer come back as one word. Where a witness gives evidence the court will ordinarily expect a professionally qualified interpreter, and a family member standing in will not survive the first challenge from the other side.
Where the language need belongs
Language need is a fact about the matter, so it belongs on the matter record at opening rather than in the fee earner's head. Record which language, which dialect where that makes a difference, whether the client reads that language as well as speaking it, and who is responsible for booking and for paying. Once that field exists, every diary date after it derives a task, and the booking question gets asked in the week the hearing is listed rather than in the corridor on the morning of it.
Written material carries the same problem. A client care letter, a costs estimate and an advice sent in English to a client who cannot read English are not information the client has received in a way they can understand. A document in another language going into a hearing bundle needs a translation with it. Interpreter and translation fees are disbursements, so they need an estimate and the client's agreement before the firm incurs them. Who books and who pays varies. Some hearings are covered by arrangements the court makes, others leave the party to fund an interpreter for itself, and the position differs between jurisdictions. The file has to record which of the two applies here, and somebody has to settle it before the day rather than on it. The SRA expects a firm to give clients information in a way they can understand and to be able to show that it did.
This is the sort of gap the Bracton AI Assistant was built to catch. It reads every live matter overnight inside the case management or CRM system the firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim and others, which puts the language field beside the diary. A fee earner sees the matters carrying a listed date with nothing booked against them, the files where an interpreter was paid for at an earlier attendance but no language need is recorded, and the bundles holding a document in another language with no translation filed. The assistant drafts the booking request and the letter to the client, and every output reaches a qualified fee earner for sign off before it leaves the firm. It is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform that holds the matters, the diary and the ledgers in one system.
To test any of this on your own matters, begin where the evidence already sits. Interpreter and translation fees paid out and never recharged are in your ledgers now, and the ones paid twice on a single matter mark the hearings that went off. Our review reads an export of your client ledgers, cash book and bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules and nothing else, so it will not open your diary, though it will show what those disbursements have cost and how often they reach a bill. The way to see that on your own figures is to book a client account review.