I work in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and clients sometimes treat that as a pleasant convenience, a way to make the meetings more comfortable. It is far more than that. In a high-stakes cross-border transaction, language is not comfort. It is protection, and the absence of it is a hidden risk that buyers and sellers pay for without realizing they are paying.
Consider what a transaction asks of a person. They must understand consequential legal documents, negotiate terms where nuance carries real money, and make decisions under time pressure, often about the largest purchase of their life. When any part of that happens in a person's second or third language, a gap opens, between what was said and what was understood, between what the contract states and what the client believes it states. That gap is where misunderstanding lives, and misunderstanding in a transaction is expensive.
When I negotiate in Portuguese with a buyer from Sao Paulo, I am not merely translating. I am hearing the hesitation, the unspoken concern, the cultural register of how a Brazilian principal expresses caution, and I am responding to it in kind. The same is true in Spanish with a client from Buenos Aires or Mexico City. Negotiation is largely the management of nuance, and nuance does not survive translation by a third party who is not also reading the room.
On the documents themselves, the protection is even more concrete. A client who can sit with their advisor and move between the English of the contract and the language they think in, line by line, is a client who actually understands what they are signing. The alternative, signing on trust because the document is in a language one reads imperfectly, is a quiet exposure that I will not let a client carry when I can remove it.
There is also the matter of trust, which is not a soft consideration in this business but the foundation of it. A client served in their own language, by someone who genuinely holds both worlds, relaxes in a way that improves every decision they make. They ask the question they would otherwise have left unasked. They voice the concern they would otherwise have swallowed. That candor is what allows me to protect them properly.
So when I describe the practice as trilingual, I am not listing a credential. I am describing a method of reducing the risk that lives in the space between languages. In a domestic transaction that space may not exist. In the cross-border transactions I handle every day, it is always there, and closing it is one of the most valuable things I do, precisely because the client often never sees the risk that was quietly removed.
