Preview: not indexed and not linked yet.
Fer Marketing research / Original data / October 2026
Se habla español? We checked 296 US law firm websites, and 74% have nothing in Spanish
We checked the websites of 296 US law firms in 20 metros for Spanish. Three in four have nothing in Spanish, and of the firms that translate, 38% of the Spanish pages we could grade show clear machine-translation tells: ICE as “hielo”, Long Island as “Isla Larga”, a judge's bench as “el banco”.
have nothing in Spanish
220 of 296 general law firm sites: no Spanish page, no widget, no mention.
of translated pages read as machine-translated
15 of 39 gradeable Spanish pages had at least one unmistakable machine tell. Only 1 read as natural.
of translated pages declare themselves English
14 of 42 Spanish pages carry lang="en", so screen readers and translators treat Spanish text as English.
Finding 1 · 296 general law firms
Most firms offer no Spanish, and translated pages break where clients notice
How the sites handle Spanish
Technical gaps on the 42 translated pages
Spanish translation quality (rubric-graded)
General firms, translated pages (n = 39)
Spanish-domain firms, graded Spanish pages (n = 129)
Clear machine-translation tellsUnderstandable, with errorsNatural, professional
Tú or usted? 61 of 175 graded Spanish pages (35%) mix the informal and formal registers in the first screens of text.
Real captures, anonymized
What machine translation looks like on a law firm site
Every image is a real capture from October 18, 2026. Firm names, logos, phone numbers, addresses, faces and domains are blurred; the issue is marked in red.
Finding 2 · 401 firms with Spanish-language domains (separate group)
A Spanish domain name doesn't guarantee a Spanish website
These are US law firms whose domain is in Spanish (abogado…, inmigración…, accidentes…). They market to Spanish speakers, so they are a different group from Finding 1 and are reported on their own.
show no Spanish at all
48 of 401; another 4.7% offer only a translate widget.
of Spanish-language sites declare English
149 of 276 sites written mainly in Spanish carry lang="en" in their HTML.
use an English contact form
22 of 130 Spanish-language sites with a contact form in the HTML.
Side by side
The two groups compared
| Signal | General firms, translated pages (n=42) | Spanish-domain firms, Spanish-first sites (n=276) |
|---|---|---|
| Page declares English (lang="en…") | 14 (33.3%) | 149 (54%) |
| English contact form (pages with a form) | 9 / 28 (32.1%) | 22 / 130 (16.9%) |
| Machine-translation script on page | 7 (16.7%) | 13 (4.7%) |
| Tap-to-call (tel:) link | 40 (95.2%) | 227 (82.2%) |
| Meta description present | 37 (88.1%) | 199 (72.1%) |
| Clear machine tells (graded pages) | 15 / 39 (38.5%) | 21 / 88 (23.9%) |
| No hreflang to the Spanish version | 20 (47.6%) | n/a (single-language sites) |
Spanish-first grades cover a seeded random draw of Spanish-first pages, not all of them.
General firms by metro
| Metro | N | Spanish pages | Widget only | Claims only |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 37 | 9 | 3 | 3 |
| Los Angeles | 27 | 7 | 3 | 1 |
| San Francisco Bay | 24 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Dallas–Fort Worth | 17 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Tampa | 17 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Chicago | 16 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Portland | 16 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Seattle | 15 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Detroit | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Miami | 14 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Denver | 13 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Atlanta | 12 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| Houston | 12 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Philadelphia | 12 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Washington | 12 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Phoenix | 11 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Boston | 10 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| St Louis | 9 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Minneapolis–St Paul | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Charlotte | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Counts per metro are small; read them as context, not as metro rankings.
How this compares with other 2026 research
- The 9pm Test (wealthmarketing.ai, September 2026): 308 personal-injury firm sites in Los Angeles and Houston; machine-translated Spanish pages on 44 of 139 readable LA sites and 43 of 142 in Houston.
- Maldonado Marketing (August 2026): 50 Los Angeles personal-injury and immigration firm sites, read by hand.
- Our study adds 20 metros and every practice area, technical signals (lang, hreflang, form language) and a separate cohort of firms that brand themselves in Spanish. The findings point the same way: real, native Spanish is rare.
What to fix
A 10-point checklist for a real bilingual law firm site
- Publish real Spanish pages at their own URLs (/es/), not a widget.
- Set <html lang="es"> (or es-US) on every Spanish page.
- Add reciprocal hreflang (en ↔ es, plus x-default) on bilingual sites.
- Translate the whole contact form: labels, placeholders, button, errors, consent text and the thank-you page.
- Pick tú or usted and use it everywhere.
- Have a native speaker who knows legal terms review every page; watch proper nouns (Long Island, Surprise AZ) and agency names (ICE, USCIS).
- Translate the menu, footer and disclaimers, not just the hero.
- Translate the title and meta description.
- Make the phone number tappable and say who answers in Spanish, and when.
- Re-check after every site update; translation plugins drift.
Methodology
How we ran the study
- General firms (N)
- 296
- Spanish-domain firms
- 401
- Pages graded for quality
- 175
- Crawl date
- Oct 18, 2026
Samples
General firms: law offices tagged in OpenStreetMap with a website in 20 US metros, screened to remove directories and national firms. These are the firms of our 300-site law firm study, re-crawled; 296 answered. Spanish-domain firms: 16,857 hosts whose domain contains Spanish legal words, from the public Common Crawl web graph. Of these, 949 had passed an earlier screen (law site, US phone or ZIP, Spanish or bilingual signal) and were re-crawled. We kept sites with US address evidence and no foreign-address markers, then removed generic keyword-plus-city microsites and referral networks, leaving 401.
What we checked
A polite crawler (FerMarketingStudy/1.0, robots.txt respected) fetched each homepage and, if one was linked (hreflang, an “Español” link, /es/ or es.), the Spanish page. From static HTML we classified Spanish offer, read <html lang>, hreflang, contact-form labels and buttons, title, meta description and tel: links, and detected machine-translation scripts (GTranslate, Google Translate element, Weglot, ConveyThis and others).
Translation quality rubric
- 3 · Natural: native, consistent register, correct legal terms, no English left in body copy.
- 2 · Understandable, flawed: clear meaning but awkward or literal phrasing, grammar errors, mixed tú/usted or some untranslated strings.
- 1 · Machine-literal or broken: at least one unmistakable calque that changes meaning, nonsense, or large parts left in English.
- 0 · Not gradeable. Grades were applied by an AI model with a verbatim evidence quote each; a 14% sample was re-checked by hand.
Limitations
- Static HTML only: content or forms added by JavaScript are missed. Pages without a detected form are left out of form rates, not counted as failures.
- Grades judge the first ~1,800 visible characters (menu, hero, first sections), not the whole site.
- One crawl date. OSM listings are not a census; Spanish-domain firms are a self-selected group.
- We measured what pages say, not whether anyone answers the phone in Spanish.
Open data
Download the data, charts and checklist
One row per site (296 general + 401 Spanish-domain), labelled by group, with every measurement and the quality grade where graded. No names, domains or URLs.
Embed a chart (please keep the credit link):
<img src="https://fer.marketing/studies/spanish-law-firm-websites-2026/charts/01-spanish-offer-en.svg" alt="How US law firm websites handle Spanish" width="900"> <p>Source: <a href="https://fer.marketing/studies/spanish-law-firm-websites-2026">Fer Marketing</a></p>
License: CC BY 4.0. Sampling sources: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); Common Crawl web graph.