Lawyers sometimes need to do their own foreign language investigations beyond document translation. A quick and reliable alternative to inaccurate in-house translation tools and training multiple native speakers is to leverage best practices from international affairs practitioners.
There are many similarities between the methods for legal investigations and international affairs research. The difference is that international affairs practitioners are trained to use the same critical thinking strategies across different languages and cultures. This method allows us to control the quality of the research and quickly unearth additional relevant information.
Even without knowing a foreign language, lawyers can adopt the same methods. We give one example below that is part of our online International Affairs Professional Development Course.
Sometimes multiple languages appear in your case files
If an alleged crime took place among citizens in an English speaking country and their legal team represents them in the same country’s legal system, should you assume all documents and testimony will be in English?
Lawyers know the answer—no. But law firms have evidence discovery protocols and confidential file translation tools, so do you need to worry if you only know English? Yes. Machine and human translation requires contextual and cultural knowledge, especially when interpreting informal conversation or searching for additional background on the web.
Law firms may contract a foreign language forensic linguist to analyze testimony or documents, but only after the discover plan (aka research question) is set. You pay this expert to answer specific questions that support your strategy. You get what they give you.
International affairs practitioners don’t trust this approach. We know too well the problem with assuming “we know what we don’t know.” The process for formalizing key research questions before an initial search results in overly broad and even missed questions that leave evidence on the cutting room floor.
It’s through the research process in a foreign language that we discover, iterate, and unlock high-value information for our national and corporate leaders. When we’re empowered to do the work ourselves, we leave the contracted support in the dust.
Machine translation isn’t enough
Let’s consider an international arbitration where a lawyer wants to use the alter-ego (aka veil piercing) strategy and hold a country or company accountable for the wrong-doings of its state-owned enterprises, subsidiaries, or another undisclosed entity. Typical information gathering will include collecting financial records, corporate communications, and employee rosters.
Perhaps you’ve translated the documents for your junior associate to review and also used a native language speaker to analyze the original texts. However, you can’t find any evidence in the documents that Corporation A has any relationship with Corporation B. If you think you’ve thoroughly examined a comprehensive set of the evidence, you might think you’re done.
However, Corporation B might be named in a way that enables common code words your team may not notice. As a completely hypothetical example, let’s pretend the Madrid-based multinational energy and petrochemical company called Repsol is Corporation B. Let’s pretend the logo didn’t look like a sun and you didn’t know “sol” meant “sun.” Corporation A could suggest “let’s go out into the sun,” as a way to pay “Corporation B.” Depending on the legal and cultural background of your native language translator, he or she might not notice the connection, especially if they’re only searching for keywords you preselected.
Corporation B could also be named in a way that enables common typos to “unintentionally” hide attribution. As another completely hypothetical Spanish language example, consider the Spain-based bookstore Casa Del Libro, which is frequently intentionally and unintentionally referred to as Casa Del Libre. Note there is a single vowel change.
How to find hidden evidence in a foreign language
A company chooses its name intentionally. The name could be a play on words or reference a famous historical quote. Probing a company’s name is a value-added strategy in the international affairs world, that might not be taught in legal research classes. Being prepared to adopt an international affairs mindset could unlock evidence lawyers would have otherwise missed.
Legal teams get court ordered information to review; international affairs practitioners doing open source intelligence get the internet. A strategy legal teams can use for both discovery and internet research involves asking follow up questions and iterating, with foreign language keywords.
Here’s a specific example—in cases where a legal team doesn’t know the foreign language, a lawyer could use Perplexity or ChatGPT to quickly probe the company’s name, even without an account or paid subscription.
Here’s the prompt that generated the Spanish examples above: “As a concrete example of assumption checking that can help a law firm establish an alter-ego strategy, can you find real life examples of companies whose name is in Spanish, and uses culturally-specific phrases or words in the name that have multiple meanings in that culture?”
You could tweak the prompt and use “Corporation B’s” name and ask what historical and modern day culturally specific phrases or words sound similar to it. From the perspective of maintaining client confidentiality, using the above prompt generally, or with the specific company name, would not reveal confidential information to the artificial intelligence companies. However, it could imply a strategy you’re exploring. That’s probably not a problem, but if it is, a more advanced corporate solution would be to host an open-source large language model on your local servers.
Shutdown
Both international affairs practitioners and legal investigators working with foreign language materials need quick-to-apply critical thinking strategies, and often in a foreign language. As an example of how international affairs practitioners’ methods could be applied to the legal strategy of establishing an alter-ego, this blog showed how to leverage free technology to identify other possible names based on the language and culture.
This is just one strategy International Affairs Thinker LLC teaches in its online professional development course. The training is developed by and for practitioners and teaches mindset and critical thinking to get better information faster for our national and corporate leaders. For more information, send us a note from our contact page.
