I have spent over a decade building websites and SEO for law firms. Somewhere along the way, almost every firm I worked with that wanted a Spanish site ended up on the same treadmill.
They signed up for a translation service. It worked fine. Then the bill crept up every year as they published more content, because these services charge on cumulative word counts that never reset.
And the part that always got me: the translations never belonged to the firm. They sat on the vendor’s servers. Stop paying, and your Spanish site goes dark. Google drops your Spanish pages. On the biggest service in the space, your project is deleted outright 3 months after you cancel, and getting an export first requires a plan that runs about $4,000 a year.
I wrote up what those subscriptions really cost if you want the receipts.
Here is the math that broke me. Machine translating an entire 200,000 word law firm website costs a few dollars. Once. Firms were paying a thousand dollars a year, forever, for that. Not for translation. For hosting the translation hostage.
It was never a software fee. It was rent. Firms were renting their own Spanish SEO, and the landlord could evict them at any time.
So we built our own
At Juris Digital we finally decided to stop complaining and build the thing we wished existed. It is called JurisLingo, a WordPress translation plugin for law firms, and it takes one position above all others: the firm owns everything.
Every translation is stored in the firm’s own WordPress database. Cancel whenever you want. Your Spanish pages keep working forever. You just stop getting new automatic translations. That single design decision kills the entire hostage business model.
The rest followed from ten years of legal marketing scar tissue:
- Spanish that ranks. Prospects search “abogado de accidentes cerca de mi,” not literal translations of English legal terms. The AI translates for how people actually search, in US Spanish, with a legal glossary.
- Disclaimers stay faithful. Bar advertising rules require parity between languages, and generic translation quietly breaks that.
- Proof over promises. A dashboard shows exactly how many views, leads and calls the Spanish pages produced. If Spanish is not signing cases, you should know that too.
- A real exit ramp from the old services. The migration tool imports every translation a firm already paid for, human edits included, verifies it page by page, then cuts over with zero downtime. We moved 139,990 translations for a 1,400 page injury firm in one afternoon, and their rankings never blinked.
The bigger point
There are over 42 million Spanish speakers in the US and most law firm websites still serve them nothing, or serve them a browser widget Google cannot even index. Spanish legal search is the most underpriced channel left in this industry. The only thing standing between most firms and that channel was a rental model that punished them for growing.
If you run a firm, or you market for one, and any of this sounds familiar, take a look at lawfirmtranslation.com. We are onboarding the first 5 firms at $19.99 a month with our team doing the entire setup and migration for a one time $99.
Own your Spanish site. Do not rent it.